Movies - The General

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	Movies - The General

The General is a 1927 silent comedy about a bumbling Confederate engineer (train driver) who pursues Union spies who steal his beloved locomotive, The General, which incidentally also carries his estranged girlfriend, Annabelle Lee. Buster Keaton starred in the film and co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman. It was adapted by Al Boasberg, Bruckman, Keaton, Charles Henry Smith (uncredited) and Paul Girard Smith (uncredited) from the memoir The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger.

The story

The plot turns on a chase between two locomotives and a railroad worker, played by Keaton, initially on a handcart and later on another locomotive. Although played for laughs in the film, many of the events actually occurred in a chase through Georgia and Tennessee between trains pulled by locomotives named General and Texas (see Great Locomotive Chase for more details on the actual event). The event was also the subject of the Disney film The Great Locomotive Chase.

Keaton performs lots of dangerous physical stunts on and around the moving train, which include jumping from the engine to a boxcar, sitting on the cow-catcher, and running along the roof.

The climax of the film includes a spectacular moment where a bridge (sabotaged by Keaton's character) collapses as a railroad train crosses it (compare The Bridge on the River Kwai
). Keaton filmed the bridge collapse in the pine forest around the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, using 500 extras from the Oregon National Guard. This scene was one of the single most expensive shots in motion picture history at the time. The production company could not afford to remove the wreckage after the scene was filmed, so they left the wrecked locomotive in the river bed, where it became a minor tourist attraction for nearly twenty years. The metal of the train was salvaged for scrap during World War II.

Critics and audience responses

The General received only mediocre reviews upon its release. It was not one of Keaton's biggest box office successes, which disappointed him as he considered it to be the best of all his movies. Audiences and critics would later agree with him after re-considering the film, and it is now considered a classic.

The film is consistently in the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #18 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

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