The General (1927 movie)

The General is a 1927 silent comedy about a bumbling Confederate engineer who pursues Union spies who steal his beloved locomotive, The General, which incidentally also carries his estranged girlfriend as well. Buster Keaton starred in the film and co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman[?]. It was adapted by Al Boasberg[?], Bruckman, Keaton, Charles Henry Smith[?] (uncredited) and Paul Girard Smith[?] (uncredited) from the memoir The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger[?].

The plot turns on a chase between two locomotives and a railroad worker, played by Keaton, on a handcart. Although played for laughs in the film, many of the events actually occurred in a chase through Georgia and Tennessee between trains pulled by locomotives named The General and The Texas. The event was also the subject of the film The Great Locomotive Chase[?].

The climax of the film includes a spectacular moment where a bridge collapses as a railroad train crosses it. This scene was one of the single most expensive shots in motion picture history at the time, though Keaton felt it was worth it. The production company couldn't afford to remove the wreckage after the scene was filmed, so they left it there, where it became a minor tourist attraction for nearly twenty years. The metal of the train was salvaged for scrap during World War II.

The General received only mediocre reviews upon its release. It was not one of Keaton's biggest box office successes, which disappointed him as he considered it to be the best of all his movies. Audiences and critics would later agree with him after re-considering the film, and it is now considered a classic.

The film is consistently in the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #18 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.