CHARLEY BRADY
For those of you going along next Saturday 24th August to the Silent Cinema Galway’s presentation at Pálás Cinema, you are in for a real treat. Whether it is your first viewing or your tenth, Buster Keaton’s The General (co-directed by his friend Clyde Bruckman) is as good as it gets for nearly perfect silent film entertainment.
You will be seeing a film that even more than most comes up regularly for reappraisal and reevaluation; and has done so since its 1926 release, when it opened to quite poor reviews and indifferent audience reaction.
And reappraisals continue, even for those of us relatively familiar with this tale of a likable train engineer during the American Civil War. In fact, seeing it most recently at a showing by Adam Scheffler at Silent Cinema Galway I wondered how I could have ever seen it as a comedy! Keaton without doubt deliberately toned down the slapstick elements; in many ways, it is a straightforward love story between a man and his locomotive. How’s that for an out-there rom-com idea?
What I don’t think that many would dispute these days is that it was a major forerunner of the modern action film. Yes, there were films before this that could just about fit that description; but here the action is crafted and presented with a certain shape to it – whether with the set-ups or the sheer audacity of having a film composed pretty much of two long chases.
However, no matter how audiences were regarding it in any given era, The General stood until the end of his days as the film of which Buster Keaton was most proud. He regarded as a personal triumph the fact that he took an actual Civil War incident and – despite the romantic and comedic elements – stuck closely to the details.
Enter the Complainers
While we’re on the Civil War subject, let me get one of my many bugbears out of the way.
Look: I get it. There are people out there who just like to be offended… by anything. They wake up in the morning, take a look at their alarm clock, and wonder what they can find to be outraged at today.
A little under a decade ago one of those boring, tedious, politically correct clouds spontaneously formed and went floating around, to find a home over the head of people with nothing better to do than try to rewrite the history of classic films.
Yes, you’ve probably already guessed it: it became flavour-of-the-month to question The General and its Confederate leanings. Bafflingly, even an actual Keaton admirer like Quentin Tarantino got in on the act, when he did a commentary on the Blu-ray release of the film. And you could hardly accuse that guy of being politically correct!
I think I’m going to have to watch The Outlaw Josie Wales again. I was obviously mistaken in rooting for Clint Eastwood as the Southern Civil War renegade.
It's like a bloody illness, this almost pathological need to judge films of a hundred years ago through the prism of modern thinking. It won’t be long now until some feminist critic views The General through the lens of the white patriarchy being responsible for everything. (Whoops! Bad example: in this case, they might be correct, ha-ha.)
What the heck, times change and go full circle. Bizarrely enough, the original script for The General had the Union as heroes, but Keaton himself changed that as he didn’t think that the audience of his day would accept them as the good guys.
“Stunt Men Aren’t Funny”
Leaving aside the professional Moaning Minnie’s of the world, the sane among you will simply relish The General as one of the great films of not only the silent era but of any era.
Film critic and Charlie Chaplin biographer said of it: “Every shot has the authenticity and the unassumingly correct composition of a Mathew Brady Civil War photograph.”
For modern audiences, raised on a diet of stuntmen and now CGI, what is most jawdropping is that there are no stuntmen, that there are no special effects as we would understand them today. Most of the incredible feats that you see on screen are all done by Buster Keaton himself, a man who not only didn’t think that stunt men were funny but who appeared to feel neither pain nor fear.
What you see up there on the silver screen is the real deal: a dam was built just so that they could shoot it being blown up. An entire bridge was burned down. And in the most expensive shot in silent film history, a real vintage locomotive went onto the bridge and into the river.
It does seem like insanity when you put it down like that. But it was controlled insanity, although there were certainly plenty of accidents during the shooting.
Here’s an odd thing. Over the years I’ve read a fair bit about the making of The General; and yet what stands out for me – outside the mayhem of the shoot, outside of Keaton’s near-supernatural timing -- is the kindness of the man towards the enthralled citizens of the small Oregon town near where it was filmed. The stories are too many to go into here; but I always come away thinking that – along with the likes of Stan Laurel – we are not only talking about a genuine genius, but a really decent if flawed human being.
And those are the ones that fascinate me the most.
I hope you can make it to the Pálás Cinema on Saturday. For this viewer, no chance to ever see The General on the big screen should be passed up. Enjoy!
charleybrady@gmail.com
