Also directed by Clyde Bruckman but that would be too long of a title I think.
As one of the two silent films on my list, this is my FIRST Buster Keaton film ever. Charlie Chaplin is the kind of silent film star you grow up hearing about, and then suddenly someone makes you watch (in this case, “someone” is myself) a film by this random guy who occasionally had some gifs on Tumblr you thought were cool. Also people namedrop him in your film classes to sound like they wish they were born in the 1910s.
Yes, like that.
So The General made its way onto my list by basically being generally recognized as iconic, and by being on the Criterion Collection on Hulu.
In it, Buster Keaton plays a train engineer in Georgia at the start of the Civil War. His fiancée can’t wait to be the bride-to-be to a Confederate soldier, but Buster’s character, Johnnie Gray, is rejected from the army because they need him as an engineer. His superficial fiancée promptly leaves him.
A year later, Johnnie’s train, named The General, is hijacked by Union soldiers with his (ex?)fiancée Annabelle on board.
Johnnie is fast enough to fly but not fast enough to catch his stolen train, and so begins an elaborate and insane chase film with a Civil War context.
The film is actually based on a true story, the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862, where Union soldiers stole a train and took it from Georgie to Tennessee, destroying the Confederate railroads along the way. I’m not sure why Buster would situate an audience on the Confederate side of a war movie (then again so does Gone With The Wind), but the fact that he doesn’t directly fight in the war helps.
ALSO, the stunts are MIND-BLOWING.
Like, someone let Buster Keaton film that. Although watching it now it could be a green screen of some sort (or the 1920s equivalent of a green screen). Either way SOMEONE had to film themselves passing in front of a moving train.
This shot is insane and would’ve gotten someone killed today. Basically the Union solders litter the railway with boards to try to stop Johnnie, but he is batshit crazy and nothing can stop him.
Anyway the film has a happy ending that is both exciting and satisfying in a way that even Michael Bay and Roger Ebert could agree on.
The film did not do well on its first release, financially or critically, making just $1 million on a $750,000 budget. No one bothered to renew its copyright so the film entered the public domain in 1954.
Today, however, the film is #18 on the AFI Top 100 and #136 on the IMDb Top 250. It predates the Oscars so nothing there unfortunately.
No comments:
Post a Comment