The General

I struggle with silent films. I don’t hate them, but I do have a significantly lower attention span with them than I do with modern movies. It isn’t so much the lack of dialogue, alone, but also the lack of sound effects and ambient noises. The result is that my interest wanes at around an hour into any silent movie. The General clocks in at around an hour and twenty minutes and I was pleasantly surprised that it kept my attention all the way through.

The movie’s action revolves around a rather simplistic plot. Our hero, played by Buster Keaton, loves just two things. One is trains and the other is a beautiful southern belle. To win her love, and for seemingly no other reason, he tries to join the Confederacy. Wacky high jinks ensue as Keaton chases down and rescues a kidnapped girl, thwarts the plot of some Union spies, and accidentally becomes the hero of an important battle (including one of the most expensive stunts of the silent era).

Not surprising from a Buster Keaton picture, but The General’s greatest strengths lie in its visual gags. Some of the more famous bits, like the bridge explosion or knocking the spars off the tracks, don’t create the high drama that they did in the 1920s. This is understandable since the filmmakers had neither the visual sophistication nor the complete tool set (including sound and score) that a modern filmmaker has to create and release tension in these moments. On the other hand, the numerous smaller comedic bits are just as funny as ever. These moments are all over the movie. There are far too many to enumerate them all, but one in particular that stood out to me was where Keaton’s character keeps trying to sneak back into the enlistment line, again and again, after repeatedly getting rejected. This bit had me cracking up and, being early in the movie, does a great job setting the tone for much of the rest of the movie.

There are also some moments that are unintentionally funny, due to some ambitious but largely unsuccessful attempts to incorporate visual effects into the film. There is a large storm sequence near the middle of the film that includes some amazingly laughable effects. The lightning looks like a kid’s drawing and isn’t even accompanied by a bright flash. When these unconvincing effects are combined with a bit of tonally ambiguous action, in this case a sequence of escapes from bear traps that seem to inexpertly walk the line between attempting to raise the stakes with genuine peril and playing up the moment for laughs, these effects shots end up just as goofy as the planned comedic gags.

While the choice to make Keaton’s character a hero of the South seems a bit odd, especially considering the dramatic irony of knowing the Confederacy eventually loses and his time as a hero is bound to be short lived, the key elements of the movie, namely the physical comedy and whimsical attitude, work very well. Keaton had a gift for this kind of filmmaking and, ignoring the peculiarities of the silent film era, this translates into a movie that holds up remarkably well. However, if you find the simple piano/organ scores, lack of dialogue and sound effects, and immature filmmaking technique of the 1920s too bygone for your tastes, no amount of expertly crafted gags or vaudeville honed slapstickery will likely outweigh your preexisting disinterest.

Would Recommend: If the physical comedy of Rowan Atkinson or Harpo Marx never fails to make you laugh.

Would Not Recommend: If even the thought of a silent film bores you.