FILM 1480: THE GENERAL
TRIVIA: In the train crash a dummy
was used as the engineer. It looked so realistic that the townspeople who had
come to watch screamed in horror.
The first try at getting the
cannonball to shoot out of the cannon into the cab caused the ball to shoot
with too much force. To cause it to shoot into the cab of the engine correctly,
Buster Keaton had to count
out the grains of gunpowder with tweezers.
Based on a true incident during the
Civil War. In April 1862 Union agent James J. Andrews led a squad of 21
soldiers on a daring secret raid. Dressed in civilian clothes, Andrews and his
men traveled by rail into the Southern states. Their mission was to sabotage
rail lines and disrupt the Confederate army's supply chain. At the town of Big
Shanty, GA, (now known as Kennesaw, Georgia) the raiders stole a locomotive
known as "The General." They headed north, tearing up track, burning
covered bridges and cutting telegraph lines along the way. William Fuller and
Jeff Cain, the conductor and engineer of "The General," pursued the
stolen train by rail and foot. They first used a hand-cart (as Buster Keaton does in the
film), then a small work locomotive called "The Yonah," which they
borrowed from a railroad work crew, and finally a full-sized Confederate army
locomotive called "The Texas," which pursued "The General"
for 51 miles--in reverse. During the chase Confederate soldiers were able to
repair the sabotaged telegraph wires and send messages ahead of the raiders.
Andrews and his men were intercepted and captured near Chattanooga, TN, by a
squad of Confederate troops led by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest (who, after the
war, was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan). Tried as spies, Andrews and
seven of his raiders were hanged (a special gallows was built to hold all eight
men). The rest of the raiders were traded in a prisoner exchange. In 1863 the
survivors of the mission were awarded the first Medals of Honor (Andrews and
the raiders who had been hanged later received the medal posthumously).
Although this film is a comedy, the incident was later filmed by Walt Disney as a drama, The Great Locomotive Chase
(1956), with Fess Parker--a
Southerner, born in Texas--as Andrews.
Buster Keaton always said
that this was his favorite movie.
Buster Keaton wanted to
use the real locomotive "The General", which was at the Nashville,
Chattanooga, and St Louis Union Depot in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The railroad
initially permitted him to do so, even providing him with a branch line to film
on. However, when it became known that the film was to be a comedy, the
railroad withdrew permission and Keaton had to look elsewhere.
The failure of the original
copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into
public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD
copy of the film. Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the
market are either severely (and usually badly) edited and/or of extremely poor
quality, having been duped from second- or third-generation (or more) copies of
the film.
For the scenes with the opposing
armies marching, Buster Keaton
had the extras (which included Oregon National Guard troops) wear the gray
uniforms of the Confederacy and march in one direction past the camera, then he
had them change uniforms to the Union blues and had them march past the camera
in the other direction.
The film's hard-edged look was
inspired by the battlefield photographs of Matthew Brady, which captured the
carnage of the Civil War in shocking detail.
