The General

Although considered Buster Keaton's masterpiece, The General (1926) is also the film that destroyed the comedian's career.  Contemporary reviews were scathing and the movie failed at the box office.  Keaton's producer, Joseph Schenk, traded the film maker to MGM where he was, in effect, muzzled. The General was the last film over which Keaton exercised control -- and it demonstrates the risks that even beloved auteurs face when they produce a movie that doesn't meet the expectations of their  audiences and fans.  The fact is that The General doesn't comfortably fit within any genre -- at least, as genres were defined in the late twenties.  It's too grave and consequential for slapstick, too comically deflating to be a war movie, unacceptable as romance (Keaton slaps his girfriend around and literally treats her like a sack of potatoes), and not really funny.  People who claim that they split a gut laughing at this movie are either lying or have a very strange sense of humor.  Expensively produced, the film cuts against the very grain of silent humor -- Laurel and Hardy two-reelers are generally set in vacant lots and back yards in Los Angeles; their masterpiece, The Music Box takes place on an elongated flight of concrete steps  in a middle-class neighborhood and features the two boys and, maybe, four or five other character actors.  Keaton filmed The General in Oregon on narrow-gauge timber industry railroad tracks (to simulate the pine forests around Atlanta), he adapts an actual episode in the Civil War, and filmed the action with three period locomotives, dozens of box cars, and 500 members of the Oregon National Guard as extras.  The real Hollywood successor to The General is Steven Spielberg's much-despised and huge-scale 1941 -- also a movie based on real-life episode, but exaggerated and amplified to gargantuan dimensions.  1941 like The General assumed that it was a comedy -- the genre-signifying element is the presence of comedians in the movies (for instance, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi in 1941; Keaton, of course, in The General)  But both films turned out to be too portentous for comedy -- 1941 is just too big, too strained, and too violent for comedy (although I've always thought that the film does succeed within its own terms and is one of Spielberg's best and mightiest pictures); The General is pictorially modeled after the Civil War photography of Mathew Brady -- people die, not just one or two, but presumably scores, in the film.  Can you have a comedy in which there is wide-spread carnage?  This question remains unanswered -- and films with a comedy slant involving actors pretending to be killed still make audiences uncomfortable.  A lot of people didn't like Dr. Strangelove. and film critics tend to shunt these pictures off onto an ill-defined side-track --  that is, "black comedy."  In fact, The General is a dire romance about technology, a fantasia about moving machines.  It's real successors today are the Mad Max films, movies that construct elaborate gags around careening, roaring war-machines and the Fast and Furious franchise in which the stunts take priority over any sort of human interaction.  Keaton's misfortune was to invent a style of filmmaking 80 years before the world had any need for such movies.

The plot of The General is simple enough.  A railroad engineer has two loves:  his locomotive (The General) and a girl who lives in the small whistle-stop of Marietta, Georgia.  When the Civil War is declared, all the men in town sign up, but Keaton's character, Johnny Grey, is deemed to be too essential for the military -- after all, he's a railroad locomotive engineer.  (No one lets Grey in on the reason for his deferment and so he thinks he's either too diminutive or too puny for military service.)  Grey's somewhat porcine girlfriend thinks Grey is a coward and says she won't talk to him until he's 'in uniform."  A year later, some Union officers infiltrate the railroad system and steal The General.  (Their plot is to use the locomotive to reach railroad bridges that they intend to destroy behind them; they also plan to cut the telegraph lines to cover a Union advance.)  Johnny Grey pursues the locomotive, ultimately chasing it with another train.  Oblivious to the movement of troops parallel to the tracks. Grey ends  up far behind the Union lines.  Grey's girlfriend was on the train when it was hijacked and she is being held as a prisoner by the Federal soldiers.  Grey catches up to the invaders, rescues the girl, and learns their plans for battle the next day.  With the girl (she's hidden in a burlap sack), Grey seizes The General and with the Union forces chasing him with their locomotives, he drives south.  Ultimately, the Union locomotive, advancing over a burning trestle, crashes into a creek and there's a fierce battle at the river when the Federal troops try to ford the stream.  Johnny Grey participates in the battle and is hailed as a hero.  He's given a lieutenant's uniform in recognition of his heroism and gets the girl.  The first half of the movie, involving the locomotive chase to the north, is one of the most fantastically exciting sequences in all cinema -- it's suspenseful, full of terrifying stunts, and mildly humorous.  The interlude in which Keaton's character rescues the girl, spies on the Union generals, and spends the night in a violent storm is not very funny -- but it's a necessary respite from the spectacular scenes involving the trains.  Then, Johnny Grey steals the General and flees south, another brilliant sequence, although shorter and ending in the battle at the ford and the destruction of the Union locomotive on the burning trestle.  The stakes are higher here -- we actually see Keaton's character kill a sniper, although by accident (waving his sword, he flings the blade and impales the Union rifleman) and the fight at the river ford is clearly lethal, although the movie doesn't really show the carnage -- it's just suggested:  for instance, the Confederate artillery is aimed right down into the river, firing shot at point-blank range at the cavalry surging into the swift, flowing water.  At one point a coffer dam is blown apart and a huge wall of water sweeps away the Union assault -- it's left to our imagination as to the slaughter involved, but it's clearly not inconsequential.  Variety, in a contemporary review, claimed that the movie lagged -- that it was just "interminable train chases".  It's a bizarre canard -- the film is jammed with complicated and beautifully staged action stunts and the whole movie must be about 80 minutes long.

In point of fact, the movie (like many silent films) isn't really funny.  Keaton is a bizarre-looking leading man with his huge beak of a nose, his completely mask-like face, and his tiny, if fantastically athletic, figure.  You don't really warm to him -- nor are  you supposed to.  The movie is filled with pratfalls -- if there is a stumbling block anywhere within a dozen feet, Keaton will find it, stub his toe, and land flat on his face.  These jokes make no sense.  Keaton is shown to be remarkably athletic, lithe, and well-coordinated.  He scales the locomotive from front to back, clambering up its cow-catcher up to the top of the locomotive where he prances around entirely heedless of the obvious dangers associated with his balletic capers.  He dives between cars, uncouples them with his feet, dodges mortar shells, and hops from place to place with demonic agility and energy.  Therefore, it's bizarre to imagine him constantly falling over his own feet -- something that the movie seems committed to show whenever possible.  There are loopy jokes that aren't amusing at all -- lightning strikes and a tree falls on Keaton, later there's a menacing bear in the woods and Keaton's girlfriend gets her foot caught in a bear-trap.  Then, Keaton is snared by the trap, not once but a couple times.  You wince watching these gags.  Keaton puts the girl in a burlap sack and hurls it onto the baggage car of the train -- later, Union soldiers throw big barrels and trunks into the same baggage car causing us to suspect that Keaton's girlfriend has been battered to death.  Aspects of the physical world are closely observed -- when Keaton spends the night in an embrace with his girlfriend, his leg goes to sleep and he has to massage it back into sensation; if something can pivot, it will twist and turn to cause mayhem.  If there's something balanced, it will be used as a devilish sort of teeter-totter.  Everyone is equally inept -- the Union troops can't figure out how to throw a damaged switch that is impeding them on the railroad.  They labor over this for three or four (unfunny) minutes, swarming the problematic switch like Keystone Kops and doing more harm than good -- finally, a burly engineer with an ax steps forward and with one blow cuts the Gordian knot.  When Keaton finally gets his uniform, it's too big for him and his ceremonial-looking saber reaches down to his toes -- hence, he's always stumbling and falling over his sword.  Some of the gags aren't merely unfunny -- they have a dismal nightmarish aspect.  When Keaton stuffs his girlfriend into the burlap sack (an image that is unsettling enough), he first has to empty it out -- the sack is full of about two dozen shoes and boots.  Somehow, Keaton loses his own shoe from one of his feet and, then, has to desperately rummage among the footwear for his missing boot -- the Union troops are approaching and this sequence has a fearsome, dream-like intensity.  Keaton (and the corresponding Union soldiers) continuously use axes to cut apart parts of their trains to feed the debris into the locomotive ovens.  Tracks get pulled into pretzels and telegraph lines are snagged by chains and pulled behind the locomotives to block the way.  At  one point, Keaton lifts huge ties and pitches them on the wood-car, only to have them fall back on him again or to throw them too far so that they tumble down on the other side of the tracks.  The effort is obviously enormous and you wonder about Keaton getting his hands shredded by slivers and the whole task is so onerous that it has a Sisyphean aspect.  Several of the grandiose sequences have a documentary-style magnificence:  Keaton is shoveling wood into the fire while huge numbers of men and horses and caissons roll by, moving in a direction opposite to the train -- the shot is a deep-focus masterpiece..  As in the Mad Max films, the locomotive rolls through walls of fire and emerges burning on the other side.  A high angle shot shows the burning trestle, a locomotive advancing toward it, and a hundred cavalrymen on a cross-roads also converging on the bridge -- this shot has a brutal diagrammatic clarity and it's an indelible image.

The General is a great film.  But let's be honest -- it's not really a comedy and the critic for Variety, who denounced the film as not being funny, was merely reporting the truth -- the movie isn't funny; it's far greater than mere slapstick comedy.  The film suggests that history, with all its great men and noble battles, is merely a chronicle of inept bunglers falling on their faces as they try to do the best that they can.  There's no real grandeur in history -- The General suggests wars and battles are intrinsically without grace or nobility.  The movie doesn't make fun of history; it suggests that historical events, in their essence, are merely a series of accidents; it's all a monstrous pratfall.