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.

http://www.lookatthesegems.com

FILM 1197: SHERLOCK JR.

TRIVIA: Buster Keaton practiced for four months, working with a pool expert, to learn all the trick shots that Sherlock Jr. performs during the pool game. Nevertheless, it took him five days to film all the trick shots, and get them right. When he was finished, all the best trick shots he had filmed were cut together to make it look like Sherlock Jr. was playing one continuous game of pool.

In one scene at a train station, Buster Keaton was hanging off of a tube connected to a water basin. The water poured out and washed him on to the track, fracturing his neck nearly to the point of breaking it. This footage appears in the released film. Keaton suffered from blinding migraines for years after making this movie and was unaware of the reason, until a doctor diagnosed him in the 1930s.

Following his "entrance" into the "movie within a movie," the scenery changes around Buster Keaton very quickly, as if the movie is changing scenes with quick edits. (He suddenly finds himself on a crowded city street, in the jungle confronted by lions, on a rock in the middle of the ocean, etc.) Keaton later recalled that his cameraman, Byron Houck, had used surveying instruments to position him and the camera at the exact correct distances and positions to give the illusion of continuity as the scenes changed.

Sherlock Jr.'s assistant, Gillette, is named after William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes on stage.

According to the book Buster is reading, the seven rules for being a detective are: 1. Search Everybody. 2. Look for Clue. 3. Examine all windows. 4. Search for finger prints. 5. Shadow your man closely. 6. Send for the police. 7. Keep cool. Buster actually only employs rules #1 and #5 in the movie.