Back to Basics – THE GENERAL

This past week, I participated in a blog-a-thon about what I consider my best post. For a moment or two, I paused on a piece I did about films once drubbed that are now considered classics. In the article, I mention CITIZEN KANE, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, and THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION.

Had I waited a few more months to write it, I could well have added Buster Keaton’e THE GENERAL to the list. As it is, it’s the next essential film up in the 1001 Series. My full thoughts on it after the jump.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that man of you aren’t exactly aficionados of silent film. In that case it stands to reason that you might not have ever seen THE GENERAL…perhaps never even heard of it. It’s the brainchild of one of the greatest legends in Hollywood: Buster Keaton, a silent-era comedian like no other.

In this film, which he also directed and edited, Keaton plays Johnny Gray. Johnnie is a locomotive engineer who loves two things in life above everything else – his darling fiancee Annabelle Lee, and his train, “The General”. While back home in Georgia calling on his fiancee, The American Civil War commences. While Johnny dearly wants to fight and make his beloved proud of him, he is turned away at the enlistment office. The Confederacy finds him far more valuable as an engineer – they just choose not to tell him.

With no excuse for not putting on a uniform, he is branded a coward, and deemed unworthy of Annabelle.

However, the war finds him anyway, as his train gets hijacked by Union spies. A gaggle of Confederates give chase, but only Johnny seems determined to reclaim his stolen train – and though he doesn’t even know it yet, his darling Annabelle.

What makes Buster Keaton such a unique comedian, is the manner in which his comedy stems from struggling with objects. His own locomotive isn’t always co-operative with him in this story, but his dilemmas are often more basic than that. Here is a character who first can’t get a cannon to fire properly, only to eventually have it armed to the teeth and pointed right back at him.

Sometimes his fight with objects is far more sublime, such as the moment he has emptied the contents of a sack of boots on to the ground to use it in disguising Annabelle. You can’t help but laugh when he realizes he’s missing his own boot and must now find a needle in a stack of needles. Such struggles are charming, witty, and original. They allow for Keaton to express himself via physical comedy without crossing over into Three-Stooges-like slapstick.

Keaton was blessed with one of the most expressive faces in history, and he uses it to great effect to convey exasperation, determination, sadness, and best of all nervousness. Such is the case when he’s trying to rally a battalion of soldiers who get picked off one at a time by an unseen sniper. Keaton has gone to great lengths to make us laugh in this movie, but he can also entertain us with a hesitant glance at the last soldier standing.

Strangely though, as I aluded to in my intro, this film flopped when it was released in 1927. Critics thought it too dramatic to be a comedy, and too funny to be a drama. At first this shocked me to read, and then I remembered that people also chided The Beatles for The White Album when it was released. Perhaps fans of the silent era weren’t ready for something so epic – after all, it would be another few years before Chaplin would follow with silent epics like CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES.

Or perhaps they just “didn’t get it”.

Nowadays, I fear mainstream audiences can’t appreciate a nuanced gem like THE GENERAL. Leaving the dialogue out and zeroing in on physical humour might just be too much to ask in this ADD-riddled era. Little do they know that actors from Rowan Atkinson to Johnny Depp owe a lot to Keaton and his immense physical expressiveness. And seldom was Keaton’s talent in better fighting form than it was in THE GENERAL.

But Ryan, Is It List-Worthy?… Absolutely. Quite simply, this is one of the touchstones in cinema history. It would influence GONE WITH THE WIND and BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, all while being sometimes sad, often brave, and always funny. It’s a film like few others, and while it’s a little hard to track down these days, is worth every bit of effort.