The General 1926

The story

Johnnie Gray (Buster Keaton) is a railway engineer in Georgia at the start of the Civil War. He loves two things: his locomotive, The General, and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). When war comes, Johnnie tries to enlist and is turned away, on the sensible grounds that he is worth more to the army driving a train. Annabelle takes this to mean that he is a coward, and will not speak to him until he is in uniform.

A year later, Union spies slip into the South and steal The General while its passengers are at lunch. Annabelle happens to be aboard. Johnnie chases them north, first on foot, then on a handcar, then on another engine. He rescues Annabelle, takes back his train, and rides south again with the Union army behind him. He warns the Confederate lines of the coming attack and wins the battle more or less by accident. At the end he gets a uniform and the girl.

The real chase

The plot comes from fact. In 1862 a party of Union raiders seized a Confederate locomotive called the General in Georgia and ran north with it, wrecking the line as they went, and were chased by Southern railwaymen. It is known as the Andrews Raid, or the Great Locomotive Chase. William Pittenger, one of the raiders, wrote it up, and the AFI Catalog names his book, Daring and Suffering, published in Philadelphia in 1863, as the film's source.

Keaton turned the story round. Pittenger's book is the raiders' account, and the film's hero is one of the pursuers. The reason usually given is that Keaton did not think an audience would accept Southerners as the villains. Modern critics who admire the film as a comic masterpiece also point out what that choice means: the Confederacy is the home side, its cause is never questioned, and slavery goes unmentioned. In that it is typical of the American cinema of its day.

The shoot in Oregon

Keaton and Clyde Bruckman directed, with Joseph Schenck producing for Keaton's own company and United Artists distributing. Dev Jennings and Bert Haines photographed it. Keaton took the company to Cottage Grove, Oregon, in the summer of 1926. By one account the real General, by then a museum piece in Tennessee, was not to be had for a comedy about the war. Oregon offered old logging railways with the narrow track of the 1860s, forest that could pass for Georgia, and lower costs.

The company came with cannon, costumes and carriages, and bought or borrowed locomotives from the Oregon, Pacific and Eastern Railway: two or three period engines, depending on the source. About 500 men of the Oregon National Guard played both armies in the battle scenes. The wood-burning engines set the dry country alight more than once, and one fire is said to have taken 600 men to put out, Keaton among them.

The stunts were Keaton's own. He sits on the coupling rod between the driving wheels while the engine moves off. He rides the cowcatcher holding a railway sleeper, and throws it to knock another off the track ahead. He was knocked unconscious during the shoot, and a brakeman's foot was run over, which led to a lawsuit.

The bridge

The great shot is the Union train crossing a bridge that Johnnie has set on fire. The bridge gives way and a full-size locomotive falls into the Row River. A trestle was built for it, and several cameras filmed the single take. The town took the day off to watch, and thousands of people are said to have lined the banks.

The shot cost about $42,000, and it is regularly called the most expensive single shot of the silent era. The AFI Catalog words it more carefully: the most expensive scene in silent films up to that time. The engine lay in the riverbed for years as a curiosity. By most accounts it was cut up for scrap during the Second World War, and bits of track and steel are said to show at low water still.

The flop

The film was expensive for a Keaton picture. Its budget is said to have grown from $400,000 to about $750,000, and its American takings are usually given as about $474,000. The first reviews were cool: Variety thought it a flop, and the New York Times found less fun in it than in his earlier films. Sources differ over where it was first shown. It reached New York, and general release, on 5 February 1927.

The loss did not end Keaton at once. He made College and Steamboat Bill, Jr. after it. In 1928 Schenck, his brother-in-law, closed Keaton's studio and moved him to MGM, where he had far less say over his films. Keaton is said to have called it the worst mistake of his career.

Why it matters

It was rediscovered. Critical acclaim, says the AFI Catalog, began in the 1960s. In the Sight and Sound critics' poll it was 8th in 1972 and 10th in 1982. The Library of Congress chose it for the first class of the National Film Registry in 1989.

It put a real train in a real river. No model and no trick: a locomotive fell off a burning bridge, and the audience watched it fall.

It is the standard by which screen comedy is measured. Orson Welles called it the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.