I dashed out of the hall to catch the #7 bus to Balboa Park to meet Charles at the Organ Pavilion for the showing of the film The General (Buster Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece, co-directed by him and Clyde Bruckman but with Keaton undoubtedly the auteur as well as the star) with live organ-music accompaniment by Dennis James. Charles had told me he would sit near the front, but as things turned out he’d had to camp out in the third section back — and he’d got a lot of incredulous looks when he told people he was saving the seat next to him for someone else. Fortunately we were able to find each other — he was standing up in the crowd and I spotted him (smart man, especially considering our generally dismal track record for finding each other in public places) — and I joined him about 10 minutes before the event began. Dennis James turned out to be a screaming queen — once he opened his mouth to introduce his pre-movie concert program there was no doubt about his sexual orientation! He played a neat little program, including an undistinguished Sousa-esque march (Charles croaked out, “It’s … ,” when he finished the piece and I got the joke instantly — Monty Python’s Flying Circus), an arrangement of “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” a piece called “Hurry #2” by one W. T. Simon which he also used throughout his accompaniment for the film (apparently it was a short piece from one of the books of music sold during the silent-film era with pieces suitable for various screen situations, and he picked this one because it was indicated as useful for accompanying chase sequences involving trains) and F. W. Measham’s march “American Patrol” (which was in effect his second Glenn Miller cover of the evening, since Miller recorded an arrangement of “American Patrol” even before he went into the service himself).
By now The General is
pretty much beyond criticism, but seeing it in this context — not only with a
live musical accompaniment but also with a large audience (comedy always works better with an audience to laugh with you — which is why virtually all TV sitcoms feature
recorded laughter, either added later from a laugh track or supplied during
filming by a live studio audience). The print they had was a 16 mm. re-release
by a company called Essex (and, like the current video of Young at
Heart, it was edited to eliminate any
references to the original producer, Joseph M. Schenck, or releasing company,
United Artists) with some nitrate blotches (notably on the famous sequence in
which the Union train collapses into the river after it attempts to cross the
Rock River bridge after Keaton has fired it) and no color tints (the tints are
included on my video and do add
to the movie, even though The General was certainly not as
radically tinted as, say, the 1916 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the 1925 The Lost World). It was also surprising from the opening credits
that Keaton’s usual cinematographer, Elgin Lessley, wasn’t with him on this one (did he decide to take a pass
on the rough location conditions in Oregon?), though his usual art director,
Fred Gabourie, was (and certainly
the photography by J. Devereaux Jennings and Bert Haines, using a rich,
deep-focus look obviously copied
from Matthew Brady’s famous photos of the Civil War itself, was nothing to
complain about) — and there’s no doubt but that this is one of Keaton’s two
masterpieces (Sherlock, Jr. is
the other one), a mixture of comedy and violence that was at least 40 years
ahead of its time. (When I first saw it in the 1970’s I remember being
particularly struck by the horrifying payoff to Keaton’s running gag of having
his sword blade detach itself from its handle — the blade goes flying through
the air and kills a Union sniper that has been wiping out a Confederate gun
crew — and I thought at the time, “So Bonnie and Clyde was supposed to be so innovative in its combination
of comedy and violence — and here was Buster Keaton doing it 40 years before!”)
With his hair grown out to be historically authentic, Keaton was never more
beautiful physically — and the incredible attention he paid to detail in making
this movie (down to choosing his location in Oregon because it was the only
place he could find a railroad that still ran on the narrow-gauge track used
during the Civil War) and his artful use of a true story as a framework for his
film only add to the entertainment value (something Chaplin, who threw out
almost all the location footage he shot for The Gold Rush, never really learned). And one thing I hadn’t
realized until I finally got to
see The Navigator, Keaton’s film
from two years earlier, was that the great gag in The General in which he attempts to fire a cannon at the Union
train and the cannon works itself out of adjustment and points itself directly
at him was copied almost exactly from the earlier film — with only one key
difference (which made the gag a lot funnier!): instead of a toy cannon, this
time it was a full-sized one! — 8/4/98
•••••
The film shown last night at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion’s
annual silent-film showing was an acknowledged comedy masterpiece, Buster
Keaton’s The General (1926), based on a
real incident of the Civil War in which a Union raider named James J. Andrews
led a unit across Southern lines to hijack a locomotive, The General, and use it to sabotage the tracks and blow up
bridges so the South couldn’t resupply their army that was facing the Union
forces at Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Southerners hijacked a locomotive of
their own, The Texas, and gave
chase, ultimately tracking down and capturing the Union raiders, eight of whom
(including Andrews) were hanged, while the others were taken prisoner and
ultimately freed in a prisoner exchange. The film casts Keaton — with his hair
grown out and probably the handsomest he ever appeared in a movie — as “Johnnie
Gray” (the everyman-of-the-South symbolism of the name is obvious), engineer on
the Western and Atlantic Rail Road, who (as a title explains to us) has two
loves. One is his locomotive, The General, and the other is … at that point we see Johnnie posting a photo of a
woman on the dashboard of his engine. The woman is “Annabelle Lee” (an equally
obvious everywoman-of-the-South
name), played by Marion Mack — whom I’ve previously been unimpressed by but
this time around struck me as one of Keaton’s most effective leading ladies, at
least partly because he (Keaton not only starred in the film, he produced it
and co-directed with Clyde Bruckman) got a performance out of her that’s so
understated I got the impression he wanted her to be a female “great stone
face” version of himself.
That’s a good thing because, even though the writers’
(Keaton, Bruckman, Al Boasberg — later the creator of the stateroom scene in
the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera — and Charles Henry Smith) conception of her character veered from
spunky (at one point she ties wire between two trees lining the track, creating
a trap for the oncoming Union locomotive that’s chasing them) to stupid (when she
throws a stick into the train’s fire, thinking that will actually help, and
Johnnie ridicules her by putting in an even smaller piece of wood) — under
Keaton’s direction she was at least spared the cooing winsomeness that
afflicted all too many silent-comedy heroines. We first see Keaton paying court
to Annabelle Lee on the porch of her home — he elaborately knocks on her door
without realizing that she’s actually on the porch, right behind him, and it’s
an indication of Keaton’s restraint that when he finally realizes this and does
his double-take, he doesn’t bat his eyes and grin at the camera the way Chaplin
would have. Instead he keeps his “great stone face” on and registers his joy
with just a few eye blinks and the little swallowing gesture he did with his
mouth that made him look like a horse that had just been given a lump of sugar.
He’s in the living room of the Lee home when her brother (Frank Barnes)
announces that Fort Sumter has just been fired on, and her father (Charles
Henry Smith) says, “Then the war is on.” The brother announces his immediate intention
to enlist in the Confederate army, and Johnnie is determined to enlist, too —
only the man in charge of the recruitment office decides he’ll be more valuable
to the Southern cause as an engineer than as a soldier in the ranks.
Unfortunately, no one bothers to tell Johnnie this, though later he tries to
enlist again, this time giving his name as “William Brown” and his occupation
as “bartender.” He’s caught, and caught again when he tries to steal the recruitment papers from
someone who was enlisted, so he’s
immediately damned by the Lee family as a traitor to the South and Annabelle
says she won’t speak to him again until he’s in uniform.
Then the film flashes
forward a year and shows us the Union soldiers plotting the raid, and
afterwards they seize The General
while it’s on a normal passenger run and its passengers and crew have stopped
for dinner — only Annabelle had returned to the baggage car to fetch something,
so the Union raiders end up taking her hostage. Johnnie notices while he’s
washing his hands at the train stop that his locomotive is moving away without
him, so he gives chase — first on foot, then in a hand car (which Keaton has
trouble pushing to get it to work) and finally in another locomotive, The
Texas. Johnnie is supposed to be pulling a
train with Southern soldiers, but he accidentally uncouples the car containing
them so he’s going off to chase the Northerners alone. Along the way most of
the gags stem from the Northerners’ attempt to throw debris on the track to
derail him, and his quite daring (in real life: there were quite a few gags for
which Keaton was genuinely risking life and limb — even the seemingly innocuous
scene when he sits on the cross-tie that drives his locomotive and it goes up
and down with him on it could have killed him if the engine had moved
unexpectedly) tactics to clear the tracks so he can pursue. The most famous gag
was when he steals a cannon from a siding, aims it at the Union train — only
Keaton’s foot gets caught on the holder attaching the cannon car and he ends up
with a fully loaded cannon pointed right at him, about to go off. Keaton had
done this gag just two years before with a miniature cannon in his 1924 film The
Navigator, but it’s both grimmer and
funnier with a full-sized one! Johnnie ends up at the Union headquarters at
Chattanooga, where he reunites with Annabelle and frees her from Union
captivity. He also hides under a table where the Union generals (one of whom is
played by Keaton’s father Joe) are plotting to rendezvous their army with a
supply train for a surprise attack on the Confederates at Marietta, Georgia,
and in the second half of the film Johnnie re-steals The General and uses it to race back to the Southern lines and
let them know of the Union plans. Key to the Northern strategy is getting their
supply train over the Red Rock Bridge, and in the film’s most spectacular scene
Johnnie and Annabelle set fire to the bridge just in time for The
Texas, being driven by the Union men who
are chasing them, to collapse as the bridge weakens under their weight. Though
Keaton had his great special-effects man, Fred Gabourie, on this film (he’s
listed as “technical director” since the term “special effects” hadn’t been
coined yet), and Gabourie was such a master of model work that shots he created
for the 1924 silent film The Sea Hawk were reused as stock in Errol Flynn’s star-making vehicle Captain
Blood and the Flynn quasi-remake of The
Sea Hawk itself, Keaton decreed that there
would be no model work and no effects shots.
He took himself and his company to
Oregon because there was the only place he could find a working railroad that
still used the narrow-gauge track used during the Civil War, and he went way over budget on the film — imdb.com lists a total
cost of $750,000 but Donald Moews’ Keaton biography said he spent over a
million on it, the most expensive comedy film made to that time (his producer,
Joseph M. Schenck, had budgeted it for $400,000) — thanks largely to his almost
Stroheim-esque mania for realism. Keaton was shooting at a time when there were
still a few people left who had living memories of the Civil War, and between
that and Keaton’s overall love of trains (he knew how to drive a locomotive and
it was one of his most frequent pastimes; he also had a large collection of model
trains and used one for one of the funniest gags in his short The
Electric House) this was obviously a personal project for him and one on which he
kicked out the jams. Keaton clearly spent a lot of money not only on the trains
but also on all the authentic props, including cannons and rifles as well as
uniforms, and hiring the Oregon National Guard to play the soldiers (on both
sides; he’d have them dressed in Confederate grey and charge, then change into
Union blue and charge over the same ground, then cut the two together to look
like two armies were chasing each other). The locomotive that crashes through
the burning Red Rock Bridge (the fire was real and Keaton and his cast and crew
had to break off shooting briefly to put it out) was real and remained at the
bottom of the Oregon river for nearly two decades until it was salvaged for
scrap metal during World War II. For his pains The General became the first Keaton film that flopped at the box
office — though at least part of that was due to Joseph Schenck’s having just
assumed the presidency of United Artists, which meant that instead of being
released through MGM as Keaton’s previous features had been, this came out as a
United Artists release and therefore it was available to fewer theatres than Keaton’s
MGM releases. Also, the film’s rapid-fire alternation between comedy and
violence probably threw 1926 audiences as well as critics; the New
York Herald-Tribune reviewer wrote, “Some
of the gags are in gruesomely bad taste,” and it’s not hard to figure out which
ones they mean. When I first saw The General in the early 1970’s I remember thinking that the
1967 film Bonnie and Clyde had
been hailed as a ground-breaking masterpiece for its rapid alternations between comedy and violence — and
here Keaton had been doing it four decades earlier! The scene I was
particularly thinking of — and I suspect one of the ones that aroused the Herald-Tribune critic’s ire — was one in which the running gag of
Keaton’s sword blade coming off when he tries to draw it has its payoff when
the blade flies through the air and impales and kills a Union sniper who’s been
picking off the Confederate artillerymen.
The General is one of Keaton’s two best films (his audacious
dream fantasy Sherlock, Jr. from
1924 is the other) and an indication, along with Charlie Chaplin’s The
Gold Rush from a year earlier and the Harry
Langdon-Frank Capra film The Strong Man, also a 1926 production, of what heights silent comedy had reached at
the tail end of the silent era. Yes, the pro-Southern orientation of the story
is politically problematic — in the 1950’s Keaton told an interviewer that he had to play a Southerner because the obligatory happy
ending required that he end the film on the winning side, and though the North
won the overall war the South had won the particular battle he was filming — I
noticed Charles quietly applauding whenever the Union forces on screen scored a
victory even though we were “supposed” to be rooting for the boys in grey.
Keaton returned to the Civil War as a subject when he did gags for the 1948 Red
Skelton film A Southern Yankee
(for which he worked out a great scene in which Skelton wears a uniform that’s
blue on one side, grey on the other, and when the blue side faces the Union
troops and the grey side faces the Confederates both sides salute him — only he
turns around, and this time the blue side faces the Confederates, the grey side
faces the Unionists, and both sides shoot at him), and the original story was
filmed by Walt Disney in 1962 as The Great Locomotive Chase (with real-life Southerner Fess Parker playing
Keaton’s role) — but The General
is the film people remember even though it’s not the start-to-finish laugh-fest
many of Keaton’s films (especially his shorts) were. Instead it’s a
character-driven war movie whose laughs come from situations and comic action
scenes that arise naturally from the story — Keaton having realized early on in
his feature-film career that he had to pay a lot more attention to story development and consistency,
and avoid the cartoon-like gags he’d done in his shorts — while the physical
“look” of the film (J. Devereaux Jennings and Bert Haines were his
cinematographers) is absolutely consistent with the photographic record we have
of the Civil War; at times it looks as if the pictures of Matthew Brady and
Alexander Gardner have come to life before our eyes. It’s no surprise that
Keaton and Raymond Rohauer chose The General as the film with which they would re-introduce him
to the public in the late 1950’s; it was a ground-breaking film that, like the
Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Vertigo and many other films that flopped at their original
release and later became acknowledged classics, needed time to catch up to it.
— 8/23/16
