Could you imagine? Anyway, The General is the quintessential Buster Keaton film and one of the mandatory films I point to when describing why the silent film era was so important.
When I think of films like these, I try to think of the era in which they were created. This piece of work came out 92 years ago. I only know a handful of people that were around when this film was released. I can't imagine the difficulties they had to go through to acquire the materials to make this film authentic to Civil War times. Sure, people were still alive that had fought in the Civil War when this came out, although it was 60 years prior to this film's release, but it likely took no small amount of work to make this up to par.
Buster Keaton will always be funny to me. For instance, his deadpanned line of "if you lose this war, don't blame me" after being thrown out of the office is just great for some reason. I like to imagine that audiences burst into laughter, but given the lack of commercial success I'm not so sure they did. Was Keaton ahead of his time? Vaudeville was quite popular back then so there were tons of performances, although maybe it's just that the cinema industry was still a little behind the times? I didn't look into it far enough.
Even though this was filmed in Oregon, it taking place in Marietta, GA made me happy because I have a lot of family from there. I wonder how accurate the filming location was compared to 1925 Marietta.
I would hate for those who saw The General now to compare it to films from this era, because this was groundbreaking stuff when it came out. A lot of it is simple slapstick, but I was raised with the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes so this is proto-all of that. You can feel that the creators of those works watched these films and took notes at what jokes and stunts landed. Packing the cannon with the whole can of gunpowder and a couple cannonballs, all while getting stuck on the train car and chain, and then the cannon aims directly at his train - it's classic stuff. I feel like I could keep pointing out funny parts but I won't you've all seen this already.
Things feel a lot more authentic in this film and the parts where they take shortcuts are more noticeable, like the shots of the train with a scrolling background instead of actually showing the train moving. But above all, it's simple. Simple can be wonderful, and in this case it most certainly is. Whether it's getting burned by a cigar or falling off something or stealing a wonky bicycle or getting sprayed by a water spout, it's all out in the open. Yotsuya nailed it. There's no trickery here, what you see is exactly what you get. You want action and excitement? You got it. You want a love story of a man trying to win the heart of a woman? Sure. You want some comedy gold? Nailed it. Love it.
This film makes me happy. It's such a huge contrast from last week's Stalker, I love the SMC.
9/10 classic.
