Starring Buster Keaton, Marion Mack and Glen Cavender
Johnny Gray is a man with two loves: his girl Annabelle and his train named The General. When shots are fired at Fort Sumter, Johnny tries to enlist in the Confederacy, but the recruitment office decides he is more valuable as a conductor. Annabelle assumes he is a coward and refuses to see him until he is wearing a uniform.
A year later, Johnny is still working on his beloved train and still loves Annabelle from a distance. Union soldiers steal The General to use as a Trojan Horse in a campaign against the confederates. Johnny is soon in pursuit in another train. To raise the stakes, Annabelle has been captured on The General by the Union army.
Can Johnny recover both of his loves? Can he warn the Confederate Army of the coming danger? And will it all be enough to win back the hand of his girl?
Okay, confession time: I really struggled with this review.
I turned on The General with pretty high expectations. It's generally acknowledged as a classic. I knew of the movie from a slew of "Best Movie Ever" type lists, but I didn't know anything about it.
It took some warming up for me to like this movie. I don't love it, but I like it.
Maybe it's the burden of expectation. Not that it would be the greatest film ever, but that it would be funny. I mean that's what a Buster Keaton film is all about, right? My expectation was a stitch-busting comedy in the vein of his previous work.
It's not funny, or at least that's not principally the focus. Call it an action film or a chase film, but it's really not a comedy.
Once I accepted the movie on its own terms, I started to really enjoy it.
The General has two big things going for it: an interesting premise creatively executed and the complete fearlessness of its star.
At its core, this is a chase movie between a couple of trains. Think about that for a moment. A chase. Between two trains. On the same track. How interesting could that possibly be?
In the right hands, it turns out it can be enthralling. The film constantly wrings drama and tension out of the situation and it's endlessly inventive in creating new obstacles for the trains.
We see debris thrown onto the track. Rail switches used to dramatic effect. Rail cars set on fire and released. Wood dropped from an overhead rail onto the train passing below. Keaton and his crew understand the world of the train and squeeze out all of the dramatic possibilities.
Of course, to realize the drama and humor of the script, you need a star who is game for anything. And Keaton is audacious.
The danger to the star throughout the film only really hit me during a quieter moment. Keaton is standing on one of the cars chopping a piece of wood. My brain says: " man, he is awfully close to the edge... [pause] ...
When today's Hollywood actor performs a dangerous stunt, the studio makes damn sure you know it in a "Wow, that really is Tom Cruise climbing the mountain" kind of way. The General never does that. It never underlines the peril the hero is constantly in.
Whether he is absent-mindedly moving up and down on a tender or sitting on the cowcatcher of a moving train, you never feel like it's a stunt. He races across train cars, jumps on and off moving engines and sits next to steel wheels that could crush him, but it's all second nature to Johnny Gray It simply what the character has to do to clear the next hurdle.
That highlights one of the slight issues I had with the film. That constant danger never feels... well, dangerous. Keaton is so at ease in racing around that train that it undercuts a bit of the tension of his situation. If he had almost fallen or if we'd seen something crushed by the train, it may have amped things up.
I liked The General. A lot, but I didn't love it. That said, I am anxious to revisit it so I can experience the film without my prior preconceptions. It's a remarkable achievement to create a chase film between two trains, let alone one that has both tension and humor.
**** out of *****
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