The General [1926] [DVD]

Long acknowledged as `the' Keaton film - and the one that he chose to restart his career at Venice (if I remember correctly) - The General shows Keaton at his subtle, stone-faced best, although I wouldn't recommend it as the place to start discovering Keaton if you haven't done so yet. The shorts provide more of an accessible view of the quintessential Keaton as his death-defying best, performing stunts that these days - and even towards the end of his own career, when Hollywood wanted to protect his valuable name and image - are reserved as the domain of stuntmen.
He still dices with death in The General, notably when he throws one railway sleeper at another to pivot it from a railway line, while leaning backwards on the front of a moving-train (apparently with no way of preventing the train hitting the sleeper if he had missed), but this film is more notable for the way it easily maintains the viewer's attention using what is essentially a one-thread plot for over 100 minutes. Today, we've become accustomed to criss-crossing narratives and films being covered in ridiculous attention-seeking smatterings of special effects - to the detriment of the narrative - but Buster works things entirely the other way. And not just because special effects weren't at his disposal - as he shows in his short `The Cameraman', in which he pushed the moving image to places it had never been before.
Even outside the world of special effects, Keaton is much less the extrovert than his contemporaries Chaplin and Lloyd. Even though the straight-faced way he pulls off his gags is a huge part of his style, the quality of his material means that he really doesn't need to fill his films with the showboating, guff and common Laurel and Hardy style slapstick that others often relied on to pad out a film.
To put it bluntly, the film could be compared to a 80-minute chase with a bit of social history at the beginning a huge fight at the end and Buster getting the girl, but the way Keaton works the chase - the narrative that is woven into it; his wonderful on-screen persona; his marvellous directing (the shots of Buster on the train going in the opposite direction from the troops, and the point-of-view shots when Buster is trapped under a table in the enemy meeting house) - make the film much more than the sum of its parts.
Appreciable on myriad levels, The General deserves it place in the annals of film history.

While the General is a great film I have serious doubts about the quality of this print which lack the sharpness of many of the carefully restored masterpieces of the silent screen we have seen in recent years. I am also convinced that the speed of this particular print is too slow (and to be fair prints are usually too fast) which you can see when people are walking.

This silent film is a joy for all lovers of the silent era and for railway fans. The escapades of Johnny (Buster) as he rescues the two loves of his life, his engine 'The General' and Miss Annabelle Lee, are comic masterpieces. The humour may be from the 20s, but it doesn't date. I have recently seen this film at a special viewing at the Alexandra Palace, and can honestly say that there was not one member of the audience who didn't leave with a smile on their face.

Buster continues to do all his own stunts, and in this film one of the simplest looking is also one of the scariest - how many of us would calmly sit on a steam locomotive's connecting rod as the train moves into the engine shed?

I would recommend this film unreservedly; a good laugh is a tonic to the system, and the NHS couldn't prescribe anything with a better guarantee to lift the spirits.