THE GENERAL

Before the advent of sound caused his premature decline, hastened by personal misadventures (divorce, alcoholism), Buster Keaton made a number of admirable feature films, among which ‘The General’ stands out. This was his last film as director, based on a novel by William Pettenger and inspired by a story that really happened during the Civil War, that of the Southern mechanic Andrews. The fusion of man and locomotive, together with the richness of the inventions and the train’s journey across the great American spaces, consigned this film to legend, despite the difficulties encountered at the time of its release. It is thanks to films like this one that ‘the comedian who never laughed’ (he couldn’t smile by contract) should be considered, along with Chaplin and the Laurel-Hardy duo, as one of the giants of comic cinema, capable of ‘reaching the absolute by simplification, of acting without capitalisation’.