#the general

[ferretastical-spectacle]

Genuinely feel like I’m going crazy. Am I the only one who doesn’t think this movie is a masterpiece??

So I just watched The General (1926), bc I’ve been wanting to get into Buster Keaton silent films and I read that this is considered his “magnum opus”, so I figured I’d bite.

I barely made it through bc I was incredibly bored, and keep in mind I’m usually pretty entertained by silent films. I’ll say the stunts were quite impressive and nail biting. Obviously the train scenes are quite perilous and thus impressive in their execution. But the rest of the movie is just….. not good.

First of all, let me address the elephant in the room— this movie is pro-confederate. It tells a story of a confederate underdog fighting back the union and has obvious pro confederate visuals like the constant waving of the confederate flag. This unsavory fact alone is enough for me to write it off as a bad movie. I didn’t want to root for the main characters and didn’t even care much for them bc of the fact that they’re confederate AND the story doesn’t do much to endear me to them. Keaton’s character is fairly sympathetic in his own right, but his girlfriend who spends much of the movie fighting beside him is absolutely unbearable. The fact that she rejected him for such a stupid reason as him not being able to enlist in the army made me dislike her for the rest of the movie. I wasn’t rooting for him, her, or their romance.

And the stunts…. While impressive, seem to go on and on. I suppose if I was obsessed with trains I’d find it riveting, but the movie to me felt like one big blur of train related shenanigans, during which half of the time I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening. There were a few scenes that got a chuckle out of me, which gives me hope that I’ll enjoy other works from Keaton, but as a whole, I was bored and irritated.

I recently watched another classic from the era, Safety Last! (1923) and can safely (or not so safely haha) add it to my favorite films of all time list. The General simply pales in comparison to the humor, heart and peril that oozes out of that movie.

I went into this movie eager to experience the supposed magnificence of this film, but was only left bored and confused as to how this is “one of the best films of all time.”

Here’s a funny observation: Buster Keatons character in this film looks a lot like the creature in Lisa Frankenstein! I’d bet he’s inspired by him— it’s obvious from the costuming to the hair to the deadpan. The creature is like if Sweeney Todd and Buster Keaton had a baby I SWEAR.

Anyways, I shall watch more Keaton in the near future but this was…. A bit of a bumpy start let’s say.

[classicsinga]

The morphing faces in Clam Baking are part of the characters' animations so even without the drug fog effect they look fucked up

[proxy-galaxy]

[keszegeteszeget]

100 éves a The General.

Hihetetlen, mennyire komoly film ez:

- mozdonyos üldözés!!!

- égő fedett fahíron keresztül zakatolás, felgyújtott összeeső fahídról vízbe zuhanó gőzmozdony!!!

For the scene in which Johnnie sets fire to a bridge to prevent the North’s engine from crossing the river, Keaton had Gabourie construct a stunt trestle designed to collapse under the train’s weight. It was the only sequence that did not use existing track and it has been called the most expensive single shot in silent film history (Keaton biographies put the cost at $42,000). It is certainly the most expensive that Keaton ever executed. He had only one shot at the scene and ran six cameras to capture the spectacle. The engine that plunged into the river was one of the doubles used to stand in for the working engines and it rested there in the water, rusting away for 15 years until it was hauled out for salvage in the scrap drives of World War II.

- az összes trükköt Keaton játszotta, dublőr nélkül: több tonnás gőzmozdonyok előtt bohockódásról, azokon sétálásról, mozgó vonaton favágásról beszélünk, meg persze hídról vízbeurhásról

Keaton learned to drive the engine himself and before long, according to the publicity of the time, he could stop the train on a dime.

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- polgárháború

- a polgári értékrend kifigurázása, a háborús hősök kifigurázása

- a délieknek “szurkolunk” a polgárháborúban

- ez egy megtörtént eseményt dolgoz fel:

“The story of The General comes from a chapter of Civil War history, a true tale of Union spies who infiltrated the South, stole a passenger train in Georgia, and drove it north pursued by Southern conductors who eventually captured the raiders. According to Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, his reliable collaborator and gag man, handed him William A. Pittenger’s account of the incident as a potential project. Keaton streamlined the story to a deceptively simple structure of two mirrored chases—one north to recapture the stolen engine and another back south—as well as added a love interest and a kidnapping to make the rescue personal. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he took on the perspective of the South. Pittenger was a Union soldier who participated in the operation, and his book describes an ambitious failure that ended with the Union heroes captured and hanged. In Keaton’s version, the underdog Southern railroad engineer Johnnie Gray is the hero and the story ends with the Confederates triumphant.

[rogueslove]

New Mutants (2009) #22

[sonimage1965]

The General (1926)

[openthefobwatch]

She bust on my keaton till I steal a train