The General (1926)

The 'talkies' were a mistake. Almost certainly my favourite Buster Keaton movie, not least of all because it seems to get better and better every time I watch it. My favourite series of gags remains the one where Annabelle is feeding wood into the furnace and she notices a hole in one of the planks and tosses it away… and the she starts sweeping up a few moments later. I can't help but smile just thinking about that section, despite the fact that many of the film's best jokes are, when you start to think about it, technically at her expense.

Speaking of technicalities, though, The General is actually based on The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger, a memoir of an event that occurred during the American Civil War. Whilst I have not yet had the pleasure of finding a copy, The General is very likely in that elite group of films that are better than the book.

At the time of its release, the The General was sold to the press by the production company in the press packet not simply as a spectacle to enjoy, but as an expensive spectacle to boot. It is evidence that, contra to one of the threads of the "cinema is dying" discourse of recent years, even by the mid-1920s, cinema culture was interested in the metatext of the film's budget and believed that to be an integral part of its appeal. Or at least a relevant part of the way the press might write about it as part of the marketing campaign.

Also highlighted was the film's purported historical accuracy. Whilst this particular idea now lands as a deadpan joke worth of Buster himself, it's a timely reminder that the supposed 'accuracy' of a piece of art will always be a terrible (if not the worst) lens through which to critically analyse an object. You'll be telling me next that Guernica didn't actually happen like that, it was in colour.