The General (1926 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  The General, released in 1926, was Buster Keaton's most ambitious film and, at the time, his most catastrophic financial disappointment. With a budget of $750,000 supplied by Metro chief Joseph Schenck, the picture earned only $474,264 in the United States. Critics called it "the least-funny thing Buster Keaton has ever done." One reviewer said flatly that it was "a flop." Yet Keaton himself said in 1963, "I was more proud of that picture than any I ever made." Orson Welles would later call it "the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made."

  How did a film so thoroughly rejected on arrival become one of the most celebrated works in cinema history? And what did it cost Keaton -- not just financially, but personally and professionally -- to make it? Those are the questions this documentary will chase, much like the locomotive at its center.

• 2. The Real Chase

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  Clyde Bruckman, Keaton's creative collaborator, brought him a book in early 1926 that changed the course of both their careers. The book was William Pittenger's 1889 memoir, The Great Locomotive Chase, which recounted a true episode from the American Civil War in 1862. Keaton was already a devoted fan of trains and had read the book before Bruckman raised it. The 1862 event was known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

  Keaton faced an immediate storytelling problem. Pittenger's memoir was written from the Union Army perspective, casting the locomotive thieves as heroes. Keaton did not believe audiences would accept Confederates as villains, so he flipped the point of view entirely, making a Confederate engineer the protagonist. That decision shaped everything about how the film was structured and how audiences experienced it.

  Keaton's first instinct was to film on location where the original events actually occurred. He tried to arrange a lease for the real-life locomotive called the General, which was on display at Chattanooga Union Station at the time. The Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway, which held entitlement on the engine, refused when they discovered the production would be a comedy. That rejection sent the production west to Oregon, where the eventual film was made.

• 3. Oregon and the Making

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  On the 27th of May 1926, the cast and crew arrived in Cottage Grove, Oregon, with 18 freight cars loaded with Civil War-era cannons, rebuilt passenger cars, stagecoaches, houses, wagons, and laborers. Keaton's location manager, Burt Jackson, had scouted the region in April because its old-fashioned railroads looked more authentically period than anything closer to California. The Oregon, Pacific and Eastern Railway owned two vintage locomotives operating in lumber service, and the production purchased them. A third locomotive was bought separately to serve as the Texas for the climactic bridge collapse stunt.

  Producer Joseph Schenck's initial budget was $400,000. Keaton spent weeks on the script and on planning elaborate pyrotechnical sequences. He also grew his hair long for the role and hired Marion Mack, a Sennett Bathing Beauties actress, for the female lead. Three 35 mm cameras came with the crew from Los Angeles. Regular train service through Cottage Grove was suspended for the entire production.

  Shooting began on June 8. Marion Mack later recalled that Keaton initially ignored her entirely on set, saying "Buster just stuck to the job and to his little clique, and that was all." She also remembered that the crew regularly stopped the train when they found a good spot to play baseball. Keaton eventually warmed to Mack and began playing practical jokes on her. Every Sunday, cast and crew played baseball against local residents, who reportedly said Keaton was good enough to have gone professional.

  The production's costs accelerated far beyond the original budget. A United Artists press release stated the film had 3,000 people on its payroll and cost $400 an hour to make. Trade papers circulated rumors that spending had ballooned to between $500,000 and $1 million. There were numerous on-set accidents: Keaton was knocked unconscious, an assistant director was shot in the face with a blank cartridge, a train wheel ran over a brakeman's foot producing a $2,900 lawsuit, and the wood-burning engine set fires to forests and farmers' haystacks repeatedly. Each burnt haystack cost the production $25.

• 4. Stunts and the Bridge

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  Keaton performed most of his own stunts on and around moving trains throughout the production. He jumped from the engine to a tender to a boxcar and ran along the roofs of moving railcars. In one sequence, he pulled a railroad tie from a track with the train bearing down on him, sat on the cow-catcher of the slow-moving locomotive while holding the tie, and then tossed it to knock a second tie clear.

  Another stunt required Keaton to sit on one of the coupling rods connecting the locomotive's drive wheels while the engine moved. A sudden wheelspin could have thrown him from the rod with potentially fatal results. The shot was done in a single take. The scene shows the train starting gently and gradually building speed as it enters a shed, while Keaton's character remains lost in distracted grief, oblivious to the motion beneath him.

  The crowning spectacle came on July 23, when Keaton filmed the bridge collapse that ends the film's central chase. The town of Cottage Grove declared a local holiday. Between three and four thousand residents showed up to watch, along with 500 extras from the Oregon National Guard, whose members also appear throughout the film dressed as both Union and Confederate soldiers. Keaton used six cameras for the sequence, which began four hours behind schedule and required several lengthy trial runs before the actual collapse was filmed. The production left the wrecked locomotive in the riverbed, where it became a minor tourist attraction for nearly twenty years. In 1944-45 it was salvaged for scrap metal during World War II.

  A fire that broke out during the filming of a large fight scene cost the production $50,000 and forced Keaton and the crew back to Los Angeles on August 6, waiting for heavy rains to clear the smoke. Production resumed in late August and finished on September 18. By the time shooting ended, Keaton had shot 200,000 feet of film.

• 5. Rejection and Ruin

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  The General had its world premiere on the 31st of December 1926, not in New York but in two small theaters in Tokyo, Japan. Its American premiere was planned for the Capitol Theatre in New York City on the 22nd of January 1927, but the enormous success of Flesh and the Devil pushed the booking back by several weeks. The film finally opened in the United States on February 5, with the engine bell from the real General locomotive displayed in the lobby as a promotional attraction. It played the Capitol for one week and took in $50,992, which was considered an average result.

  The critical response was severe. Variety described the theater as looking like it was "going to starve to death" after weeks of strong business from Flesh and the Devil, and called The General "far from funny" and "a flop." The New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall wrote that the "fun is not exactly plentiful" and that the picture was "by no means so good as Mr. Keaton's previous efforts." The Los Angeles Times said it "drags terribly with a long and tiresome chase of one engine by another." The New York Herald Tribune called it "long and tedious." Writer Robert E. Sherwood questioned whether laughter could be drawn from men dying in battle. One review called it "a mild Civil War comedy, not up to Keaton's best standards."

  The final budget had reached $750,000. Against that, the film earned roughly $474,264 domestically and approximately one million dollars worldwide. Because the picture failed to turn a significant profit, Keaton lost his independence as a filmmaker. He was forced into a restrictive contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, ending the period in which he had complete creative control.

• 6. Reversal of Fortune

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  By 1963, critical opinion had shifted so completely that Keaton felt vindicated. He said that year that he had taken "an actual happening out of the history books" and told the story "in detail too." His pride in the film, which he had maintained through decades of dismissal, turned out to be justified.

  Orson Welles was one of the filmmakers who championed the picture. He featured it in his 1971 documentary television series The Silent Years and called it the greatest comedy, the greatest Civil War film, and perhaps the greatest film ever made. David Robinson wrote that every shot carried "the authenticity and the unassumingly correct composition of a Mathew Brady Civil War photograph." Raymond Durgnat called it perhaps the most beautiful film, citing its "spare, grey photography" and its feel for the "racy, lunging lines of the great locomotives."

  In 1989, The General was selected for the first class of films preserved in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The class also included Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Singin' in the Rain, and Star Wars, among others. In the decennial Sight and Sound poll, international critics ranked it #8 in 1972 and #10 in 1982. In 2002, critic Roger Ebert ranked it sixth in the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll and placed it on his The Great Movies list. The American Film Institute ranked it #18 in both its 100 Years...100 Laughs list in 2000 and its 10th Anniversary Edition of 100 Years...100 Movies in 2007.

  In Cottage Grove, Oregon, a mural was painted on a building to commemorate the production. Film scholar David Thomson speculated it may be "the only memorial in the United States to Buster Keaton."

• 7. Lives After the Film

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  The physical life of The General as an object continued long after its release. In 1954, the film entered the public domain in the United States because its copyright claimant failed to renew registration in the 28th year after publication. That expiration opened the door to the many versions and restorations that followed.

  In 1953, film distributor and collector Raymond Rohauer re-edited the film with a new introduction and music score. Because he filed a copyright registration in 1953 and renewed it in 1983, that specific version remains under copyright today. U.S. distributor Kino International released a Blu-ray edition in November 2009, the first American release of a silent feature film on the high-definition video medium. The disc offered three different orchestral scores for the viewer to choose from.

  Composer Carl Davis, who was 51 years old in 1987, wrote a score for the film that year. That score was later paired with a 4K restoration released in 2019. Davis died on the 3rd of August 2023. In 2017, the Dallas Chamber Symphony commissioned composer Douglas Pipes to write a new original score, which premiered during a concert screening on October 17 of that year at Moody Performance Hall, with Richard McKay conducting.