The General (1926): At 100, Buster Keaton's Train Chase Is About a Man Who Is Brilliant at His Job and Nobody Notices

A man in a flat porkpie hat sits on the drive rod of a steam locomotive, heartbroken. His girl has just told him not to speak to her again until he's in uniform. The engine starts to move, and the rod lifts him up and down, up and down, carrying him into the engine shed. He doesn't notice. He's too sad to notice. That's a real rod on a real engine, and Buster Keaton is really sitting on it.

Hold on to that image, because it's the whole joke of The General in reverse. Johnnie Gray is a man who understands his machine so well he can be carried off by it without looking. What he can't understand is the world of uniforms, offices and armies that keeps turning him away. Keaton's film, 100 years old this year, is a comedy of competence: a worker who is brilliant at his job while nobody important notices, and who wins his war almost by accident because he keeps doing the only thing he knows how to do.

Two Loves and a Recruiting Office

A title card tells us Johnnie, a Southern railroad engineer, has "only two loves in his life": his locomotive, the General, and Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). When war is declared he runs to enlist and is rejected, because the army considers him more useful running trains. Nobody tells him that. He tries again, sneaks back into line, gets thrown out. Annabelle assumes he's a coward.

Watch Keaton's face in the recruiting office. He doesn't plead or rage. He looks puzzled, as if the office were a machine he can't find the controls for. Keaton himself had little patience for the idea that his heroes were fools. Sean Axmaker, in an essay for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, quotes his 1960 reply to a critic who called his character a schlemiel: "In The General, I'm an engineer." I love that line. It's defensive, a little proud, and exactly right about the film.

Then Union spies steal the General, with Annabelle aboard, and Johnnie gives chase: on foot, on a handcar, on a bicycle with one giant wheel, and finally in another engine, the Texas.

The Army Walks Past Behind Him

The scene I'd show anyone who doubts the reading comes in the middle of the chase. Johnnie is alone in the cab, chopping wood to feed the firebox, head down, absorbed. Behind him, the entire Confederate army retreats across the frame. Then the Union army advances across the same ground. He misses both. He's working.

Frank Miller's TCM article explains how Keaton pulled off armies on that scale: he hired "500 Oregon National Guardsmen to play the two armies," then switched their uniforms and filmed them crossing the screen in both directions. So the joke is built on thrift and repetition, the way a good mechanic would build it. The same men are the retreat and the advance, and the hero keeps chopping.

The chase itself works the same way. Halfway through, it flips: Johnnie steals the General back and is the one being hunted down the same track. Gags planted on the way north pay off on the way south. In the stunt everyone remembers, he sits on the Texas's cowcatcher holding a railroad tie while the engine bears down on another tie the spies have dropped across the rails. He throws his, it strikes the other at just the right angle, and both bounce clear. It's the kind of solution only someone who has thought about the physics would try. One bad bounce and he goes under the wheels.

A Real Raid, Turned Around

The story is drawn from a real Civil War episode. In 1862, Union raiders stole a Confederate locomotive called the General in Georgia and ran it north, with pursuers behind them. Keaton adapted it from the memoir of one of the raiders, William Pittenger. "I staged it exactly the way it happened," Keaton said, as Miller quotes him. He couldn't stage it with the real engine, though. Miller writes that the railroad owning the real engine, then on display in Chattanooga, refused to lend it because it "didn't consider a comedy about the Civil War appropriate."

Keaton also flipped the heroes. The real raiders were Union men; Johnnie is a Confederate. Laura Ivins, writing for Indiana University Cinema's Establishing Shot, argues that this shows how deeply Confederate romanticism ran in 1920s America, since Northern audiences found a rebel hero unremarkable. She quotes the scholar Whitley Kaufman's observation: "There is no mention of slavery or of secession." Kaufman sees the film as "a comic portrayal of war in general, not of a particular war"; Ivins disagrees, concluding that it mocks Civil War melodrama "affectionately, and in a way completely in keeping with prevailing ideas of its time."

I think both are partly right, and the competence reading is where they meet. Johnnie never shows an opinion about the war. He wants his engine back and his girl back. That makes him easy to love and lets the film avoid every hard question about what his army was fighting for. Knowing that doesn't stop me laughing. It does make me watch the flag-waving scenes differently.

So Accurate It Hurts

To shoot it, Keaton went to Oregon. Brian Bull of KLCC, reporting this September, writes that he found Cottage Grove, a town with a short-line railroad running into the Cascade foothills, and built facades that turned it into the Deep South. In Alta, Julian Smith writes that Keaton wanted the false-front buildings modeled on period engravings, everything "so accurate it hurts."

That accuracy came at a grinding pace. The parallel track the camera flatcar ran on was only about half a mile long, Smith explains, so moving shots of Keaton on the engine "could be no longer than about 15 seconds" before everything reset. A local historian showed Smith a distinctive hill, Hansen Butte, and said, "You see that over and over in the film." Keaton kept moving the camera so we wouldn't notice the trains were covering the same stretch of track.

The story I'd never heard before reading Miller involves a fire. Sparks from the wood-burning engines "triggered a forest fire," and because the National Guard was on set that day, Keaton "commandeered them as an impromptu fire crew." Smith adds that during one blaze Keaton "took off his pants and fought alongside them in his underwear." For his help, Miller writes, Keaton was "awarded an honorary commission in the Guard." The man who plays a railroad engineer the army won't accept walked off the shoot with an officer's rank, earned by doing a practical job well in a crisis. It's Johnnie's arc, lived out in real life.

The Bridge Over the Row River

Spoiler warning: from here the review describes the climax at the burning bridge and the final scene.

Running south in the General, Johnnie and Annabelle set a wooden trestle on fire behind them. The Texas follows, full of Union troops, and a confident officer's title card insists the bridge isn't burned enough to stop them. The engine rolls out, the span gives way, and the Texas drops into the river.

It was real. Bull reports the shot was filmed on July 23, 1926, near Culp Creek, before more than 4,000 spectators, with businesses closed and some posting signs reading "GONE TO SEE BUSTER." Miller writes that a dummy stood in for the engineer, six cameras rolled, and the shot cost "$42,000 (almost $1 million today)." Smith notes that Keaton wanted to drive the train into the river himself, but his wife "quashed the idea." Axmaker adds that the wrecked engine stayed in the river for years before it was salvaged for scrap during World War II.

What makes it funny rather than just spectacular is the setup. The officer gives his smug order, and the physical world answers him. Nobody in the film outwits the bridge. The only person who ever understood how these machines behave is on the other train.

Lieutenant Gray Salutes

For Keaton, the reward didn't come soon. Miller writes that the film "was greeted with poor reviews and tepid box office," lost money, and that producer Joseph Schenck then sold Keaton's contract to MGM, where he lost control over his work. Smith quotes his later verdict all the same: "I was more proud of that picture than any picture I ever made." This year, Bull reports, about 80 fans who call themselves "Damfinos" gathered in Cottage Grove for the centennial and compared old film stills with the landscape at the crash site.

See it, especially if you think silent comedy isn't for you; it runs 75 minutes, there's barely a slow stretch, and you'll understand Johnnie within a few shots. Find a version with a good score. If you'd rather start with something gentler and more sentimental, Chaplin's City Lights is the warmer door into the era; The General is the one with the engine noise.

Then watch the last scene closely. Johnnie has finally been given a uniform, a lieutenant's, for the work he did all along. He sits on the drive rod of the General with Annabelle and tries to kiss her, but soldiers keep passing, and an officer must return every salute. So he shifts around, salutes with one hand, kisses with the other, and finds a way to do both jobs at once. The rod from the opening shot is under him again. This time he knows exactly where he is.