The General (1926) Review: Keaton's Runaway Masterwork

Is The General worth watching?

Yes. The General is one of the finest silent comedies ever made, a nearly wordless chase film whose stunts and sight gags still feel dangerous a century on. Buster Keaton builds almost the entire picture around one moving locomotive and turns that constraint into a comic machine of remarkable precision. The main reservation is its point of view: the film asks you to cheer a Confederate hero, and its Civil War nostalgia sits awkwardly today.

What is The General about?

The General is set in the American South at the start of the Civil War. Johnnie Gray (Keaton) is a railway engineer who loves two things: his locomotive, the General, and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). When he tries to enlist and is turned away, Annabelle assumes he is a coward. Then Union spies steal the General, with Annabelle aboard one of its cars, and Johnnie sets off after them alone, by any means he can find.

Keaton co-directed with Clyde Bruckman, and the film loosely draws on a real wartime locomotive raid. It is an American silent feature with English intertitles, shot in black and white, and it runs about 79 minutes, depending on the print and projection speed.

A comedy built like a machine

Most slapstick of the period is a string of routines. The General is a single, continuous action film in which the gags are the plot. Nearly every joke is mechanical: a cannon that will not aim where Johnnie wants it to, a tender full of firewood that becomes a weapon, railway sleepers that must be cleared from the track while the engine is still moving. Each problem is set up, complicated and solved in a way that pushes the chase forward.

What makes this remarkable is that the physical business is real. Keaton performs on the moving engine, runs along its roof, clambers over the cowcatcher and rides the coupling rods, and the camera is usually placed far enough back to show that there is no trick. The result has a documentary thrill that later action cinema, with all its digital help, rarely matches. The film’s scale also impresses: period trains, uniformed extras and wide landscapes give the comedy the look of a serious historical drama.

Keaton’s stone face as a storytelling tool

Keaton was famous for never smiling on screen, and The General shows why that restraint is funnier than any mugging. Johnnie is earnest, practical and endlessly absorbed in the task in front of him, so the jokes come from his total concentration while chaos gathers around him. An early moment in which a rejected Johnnie sits dejectedly on the drive rod of his engine as it starts to move is both a gag and a perfect image of his character.

Marion Mack’s Annabelle is more than a damsel. She is often comically useless in a crisis, but she is an active partner in the chase, and the film finds good jokes in her attempts to help. The romance is simple, yet it gives Johnnie’s stubbornness a reason.

The awkward politics of the chase

The weakness is not in the craft but in the framing. The film treats the Confederacy with the soft-focus sentiment common in Hollywood of the 1920s, casting the Union soldiers as villains and never touching on what the South was fighting for. It is not a propaganda film, and the war is mostly a backdrop for trains and pratfalls, but modern viewers will notice the omission.

The opening stretch is also slower than what follows, with more set-up than laughs before the locomotive leaves the station. Once the chase begins, the pace rarely slackens.

Who should watch The General?

It is essential for anyone curious about silent cinema, physical comedy or the history of the action film, and it is one of the best entry points to the era because the story needs almost no intertitles to follow. At under 80 minutes it asks little of your evening. The violence is limited to battlefield slapstick and cannon fire, which makes it suitable for older children who can adjust to a silent black-and-white film.

If Keaton’s precision wins you over, continue with these classic comedies:

• Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s machine-age satire, the perfect counterpoint to Keaton’s cooler, more mechanical style.
• City Lights, which shows how Chaplin blended slapstick with open-hearted romance.
• The Great Dictator, another comedy that uses war as its stage, this time with a pointed political target.

The verdict

The General remains a dazzling piece of physical filmmaking, a chase comedy in which every stunt is real and every gag is engineered to move the story on. Its rosy view of the Confederacy and a slow start keep it just short of flawless, but Keaton’s craft and deadpan grace make it essential silent cinema.

Rating: 4/5