The General

Between Frost's Descent and the Beginning of Winter everything withdraws — so today's second film runs the other way, chasing from the first minute to the last without stopping.

The General is a 1926 silent, seventy-nine minutes, and for most of it the whole world is the distance between two locomotives. It still works, and not out of nostalgia: every gag rests on physical fact — a real engine, a real bridge, a real boxcar set alight and pushed away. Keaton used no double and faked nothing in the edit. He put the camera down and then did the dangerous thing himself.

It locks into 8½ neatly. In that film a man has far too much to say and cannot say any of it; in this one a man barely speaks, and his whole town gets him wrong.

美国南方，佐治亚州 Marietta。Johnnie Gray 有两个心爱的东西：一台叫「将军号」的机车，和一个叫 Annabelle Lee 的姑娘。

战争爆发了。Annabelle 的父兄都去报名参军，Johnnie 排在队伍最前面——然后被刷了下来。征兵处没有告诉他原因：他是一名太有价值的火车司机，军队需要他留在铁路上。他走出征兵站，正好遇到 Annabelle 的父亲和哥哥，两人朝他招手，让他排进来。他没听懂，转身走了。

在他们眼里，这只有一个解释。Annabelle 说，在他穿上军装之前，不要再跟她说话。

一年后，她坐上了「将军号」北上探望受伤的父亲。列车在一个小站停靠，乘客下车吃饭——就在这几分钟里，一伙北方间谍把车开走了，连同车上的她。

Johnnie 开始追。先是跑，然后是手摇轨道车，然后是一辆老式自行车，最后是另一台机车。

It is the technical summit of silent comedy and one of the first films to make the chase the whole structure rather than a set piece — not a chase scene, but seventy-nine minutes of nothing else. Every gag grows out of physics: a coupling released, a sleeper dropped across the rail, a cannon that will not aim straight, a bridge set on fire. Keaton's acting runs the other way: the graver the danger, the stiller his face.

The first reviews were a failure. Variety called it far from funny and a flop; The New York Times found the production handsomely mounted but the fun thin; the Los Angeles Times thought the engine-chasing-engine sequence dragged terribly; the Herald Tribune called it the least funny thing Keaton had ever done. Screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood put it hardest: someone should have told Keaton that it is difficult to draw laughter from the sight of men being killed in battle.

It also lost money. Against a final cost of $750,000 it returned $474,264 domestically. Keaton lost his independence as a filmmaker and was folded into MGM on a restrictive contract.

Then came the long reversal. In 1963 Keaton said he was prouder of it than any picture he ever made. Orson Welles called it the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made. It placed 8th in the 1972 Sight & Sound poll and 10th in 1982, 34th among critics and 75th among directors in 2012. In 1989 the Library of Congress chose it for the first class of the National Film Registry, alongside Citizen Kane and Singin' in the Rain. Both AFI lists — 100 Years...100 Laughs in 2000 and the 10th Anniversary 100 Movies in 2007 — put it at 18.

One criticism should not be skipped. In 2015 the critic Eileen Jones called it a comic masterpiece while arguing that it carries on American cinema's habit of defending the Lost Cause. Keaton said himself that he changed the point of view because he did not believe audiences would accept Confederates as villains. Both things can be true at once: a technically immaculate film, and a position that deserves to be named.