silver nitrate notes

Keaton's The General and Gravity

5 dec 2008

Buster Keaton (1895-1966) made The General (1926) at the top of his career and watched it fail. Modern audiences find this difficult to accept because the film now reads as one of the two or three silent comedies anyone needs to see. In 1927 it was a commercial disaster. United Artists lost money. The Keaton production unit at Schenck was shut down. Keaton was loaned to MGM within two years and would never again have directorial control of his own material.

The film is a chase picture built around a real event. During the American Civil War, Union agents stole a Confederate locomotive named the General and drove it north through Tennessee. A civilian Confederate railroad engineer pursued them on foot, then on handcar, then on a second locomotive. The story had been written up by its hero, William Pittenger, in a bestselling memoir in 1881.

Keaton cared about trains. He cared about them enough to build working steam locomotives of the right period, to restore an abandoned stretch of Oregon railway for shooting, and to run one of the locomotives off a burning bridge into a river on camera. The bridge collapse, which cost $42,000 and was the single most expensive shot in silent cinema, was done in one take.

What Keaton's physical comedy depends on, as distinct from Chaplin's, is that the physics of the world is real. Chaplin breaks physics for a gag. Keaton submits to physics and finds comedy in what happens when a human body meets a machine that does not care. There is a shot in The General where Keaton, operating a Civil War cannon from the back of his moving train, aims the cannon by accident at his own locomotive. The track curves away; the cannon fires; the shot misses only because the track has curved. None of this is trick photography. The track really curves, the cannon really fires, the comedy arises from geometry.

The film had a slow rehabilitation. By the 1950s it was being screened at festivals. By the 1970s it was canonical. Today it sits alongside the short comedies as the film that made Keaton's argument about what silent cinema could be, which was, in his hands, a demonstration of how ordinary bodies and ordinary machines, photographed without interference, can be funny.

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sources
[1] Dardis, Tom. Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down. Scribner, 1979.
[2] Meade, Marion. Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase. HarperCollins, 1995.
[3] Knopf, Robert. The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton. Princeton UP, 1999.
[4] Pittenger, William. Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War. J.B. Lippincott, 1881.