The General (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/10/2018

The General was our second feature starring Buster Keaton, after 1923's Three Ages, and our second film from 1926. It's also one of the handful of films from this period that I'd seen before we began this project.

Keaton plays an engineer during the Civil War who becomes involved in chasing and recovering a stolen train. This is apparently based on an actual event, but only very loosely. What this film has in common with a lot of the better silent-era comedies is a certain precision and timing, which is striking even when it is just coordinating a few performers in a mundane setting, but really achieves a type of impossible grace when it is performed with multi-ton trains that are being choreographed with a such a seemingly light touch. This is all enormously impressive, but I have to admit I did not find it as funny as I'd remembered, perhaps because I was too familiar with so many of the sequences. The thing I found the most amusing this time around was Keaton's character's frustration with his leading lady, Marion Mack, who is given a little more comedic business than many of the female leads in the comedies that we've seen thus far. Interestingly the kids made vocal observations about Keaton playing a Confederate, jokingly booing when he succeeded at this or that. The film itself is not political (except in the sense that being apolitical is political), and Keaton could easily have been playing a Union soldier with a change of uniform and one or two title cards -- but the kids still found his allegiance off-putting, at least enough to joke about. I'm not sure how funny they found the whole thing, but then I never really am. Allison, after seeing the famous scene where Keaton throws one railroad tie at another to knock it off the track, remarked "skillz", so I think she was at least a little bit impressed by the athleticism and scale of the movie.

Even though I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped, it is clear that this is just objectively a better film than Three Ages, to the extent that objectivity means anything when talking about films. For the bulk of the movie, the jokes serve the story and are not shoehorned in arbitrarily. One could perhaps criticize the romance for being perfunctory, but the main body of the film flows naturally, rarely dragging and without much fat or obvious exposition.

Next week we'll see Flesh and the Devil, our third film from 1926, and our first starring Greta Garbo. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT