The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1927)
If you’re going to introduce somebody to silent films – and what a good, true friend that would make you – then there is no better place to start than with the works of Buster Keaton. While Charlie Chaplin was always much more admired in his lifetime, and managed a vastly more successful career after the introduction of sound, Keaton’s work has probably aged better. He’s more cinematic, less sentimental, and simply more fun. Chaplin was considered at the time the pre-eminent comic artist of silent film, but as much as I like his work, to modern audiences I think he is too obviously striving for greatness. Looking back, now that neither has a point to prove – we take it as a given that both were seminal film artists – Keaton’s lack of pretension is more appealing. The General isn’t quite his best work (Sherlock Junior is even better) but it is the best of his films available on DVD in this country.
The General is built around a wonderfully symmetrical comic premise: two chases on steamtrains, one in each direction, with the roles of quarry and pursuer swapped in each. Keaton plays a railway engineer in the south during the American Civil War: when northern spies steal a steam engine, kidnap his true love, and flee to the north, he gives pursuit. In the second half of the film, however, he in turn escapes, pursued by an invading northern army. Keaton is an enormous influence on today’s filmmakers, but even so, this kind of comedy isn’t really made any more. Even Jackie Chan, Keaton’s most obvious heir, is doing something a little different, and Hollywood’s attempts at action / chase comedy rarely have the lightness of touch Keaton brings to his material. Perhaps silent film helps: there’s no engine roar, no whistling wind, no screeching brakes. It means that the pursuit is not the visceral experience of action cinema, but rather a more dignified, almost genteel comic battle.
The direction, by Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, is deceptively simple. It’s tempting to attribute the basicness of the style (in which events tend to unfold in unbroken full body shots) to the date of its filming. Yet that would be a mistake: for one thing, Keaton had already made Sherlock Junior, one of the most cinematically literate of silent films, at this point. The General’s simplicity is not a result of filmic naivety (the “proscenium arch” effect) but is instead a natural outgrowth of Keaton’s comic style. The stand-offish framing allows us to see Keaton’s whole body, while the long takes allow an unimpeded appreciation of both his remarkable stunt work and the unfolding comic situations in which he finds himself. Keaton is also very astute in the way he uses the foreground and background space of his shots to play off each other. For example, as Keaton cuts wood on his northbound train, he passes a southbound Union army in the background, thus placing him in enemy territory. Keaton’s staging of this moment is both a gag (drawing a counterpoint between his blissful ignorance in the foreground, and the situation unfolding behind) and an extremely neat and effective bit of exposition.
Despite his reputation as “The Great Stone Face,” Keaton is actually a highly expressive performer. While his face is usually impassive – although not always, as witnessed in some of his takes here, as he tries to come to grips with events that seem inexplicable because of things he has missed – his body does the communicating. The deadpan expression is not a barrier to audience’s empathy with Keaton: it is what gives him such on-screen dignity. In The General he is always the underdog, beset by misunderstandings, an unsympathetic girlfriend, and of course an army of Union soldiers. His steadfast determination in the face of all this is impressive and heroic; that Keaton could manage to maintain this performance in the face of the enormous physical risks he took is amazing. Yet the strength of Keaton’s persona means that it’s not a stunt showcase. For all the film’s big moments (such as the famous shot of the train falling into the river) it’s the little ones that are the best, such as the scene where Keaton, rejected by his girlfriend, fails to notice the movement of the drive shaft on which he is sitting.
The General was not well received on release, and Keaton’s career fell apart in the following years, for a combination of reasons: the introduction of sound; a loss of production independence; a divorce; and alcoholism. Yet he lived just long enough to see the rediscovery of his work by film scholars and audiences in the sixties. That a work of this quality would require such rediscovery in the first place might be the most remarkable thing about The General.