CaptionMax is proud to announce that our very own Jason Mitchell will be writing a monthly blog about his favorite free movies. He is our resident public domain and creative content expert, while also being a stellar caption editor. Check out his first column and get ready to watch some fantastic films with us.
When I was asked to write about my favorite movies that are now in the public domain, I was really excited about the project, but I faced a big problem. Where do I start? The number of really great films that have somehow lost their copyright in America is surprising, especially when so many are rightfully considered some of the best films ever made.
Then I happened to see the trailer for the upcoming film Unstoppable (no captions). A big-budget action movie centered around a train chase? Sounds familiar.
The General was Buster Keaton’s personal favorite of all his films. It was selected by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the United States National Film Registry in the first year that the registry was enacted, and Roger Ebert considers it one of the ten greatest films ever made. It’s pretty good.
The General recounts the true-life events of the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862, a raid by the Union forces against the Confederacy during the Civil War. Keaton plays an train engineer rejected from enlisting with the Confederate army who becomes a hero through his efforts to stop the Union raid. These efforts involve increasingly amazing stunt work by Keaton as he’s pitted against the mechanized steel of the locomotive.
Keaton was given one of the largest budgets of the silent film era, and The General includes what were then the most expensive action sequences filmed in cinema’s brief history. The climax of the film features a bridge collapsing as a train crosses it. The wreckage remained in the river bed below for nearly 20 years after, serving as a tourist attraction until the metal was salvaged during World War II.
For those averse to silent film, fear not. The General manages to avoid the silent film conventions many take issue with:
There’s not a lot of dialogue. Although silent films found ways to minimize dialogue, there’s usually a lot of scenes where people move their mouths followed by intertitles explaining what was just said. This tends to slow the action down and disconnect the dialogue from the performance. The General is heavy on the action and light on the intertitles.
It’s not boring. Coming in at around 75 minutes, The General is particularly fast-paced and even short by modern standards, pretty much amounting to an extended chase scene.
It’s not a lot of people waving their arms around. Due to the lack of dialogue and acting’s roots in the theater, a lot of silent film acting is overly theatrical. This melodramatic style is often exaggerated by silent films being played too fast in modern video transfers (A standard film playback speed wasn’t established until the sound era made it necessary). Buster Keaton specializes, however, in a comedy of understated reaction. The Great Stone Face is constantly assaulted with the unforgiving forces of the Industrial Age, and he takes it all in stride. Keaton never questions why life’s obstacles are so numerous and severe. He accepts fate’s cruelty and trudges on.
The General was a failure at the box office, and reviews faulted it for being neither a straight comedy or a straight thriller. After its release, Buster Keaton increasingly lost creative control over his projects and began working under contract for MGM, where he was no longer allowed to perform his own stunts. Keaton would later make a cameo appearance in Sunset Boulevard playing himself, a silent film star whose career was over in the sound era.
You can download The General at archive.org, along with many other works in the public domain, but Kino has made a great transfer of Keaton’s best-preserved film for DVD and Blu-Ray. Get a taste of The General’s amazing stunt work in this clip from the documentary Buster Keaton Rides Again:
(this video has no captions — sorry, we’re just borrowing the content — but hopefully everyone will enjoy his fantastic stunt work)