The General was Keaton’s masterpiece: a Civil War train chase, filmed with real locomotives, in which a small engineer became a hero.
The General was released in 1926, directed by Keaton and Clyde Bruckman. It was loosely based on a real event of the American Civil War, the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862. Keaton played Johnnie Gray, a Southern railway engineer who was rejected by the army because his job was considered more valuable than soldiering. When Union spies stole his locomotive, the General, with his girlfriend Annabelle Lee aboard, Johnnie pursued them on foot, by handcar and by another locomotive.
The film’s train sequences were filmed with real trains on real track, in Oregon, and they included a famous shot in which a locomotive crashed through a burning bridge into a river. Keaton performed many of the stunts himself, sitting on the front of a moving train and handling the machinery with apparent ease.
The General was not a success on its first release, and it was expensive to make, but it has since become Keaton’s most celebrated film. It is now regularly listed among the greatest comedies ever made, and it showed, more than any other film, how Keaton combined engineering, landscape and a perfectly still face into a new kind of screen comedy.