The General (1926)
Directed by Clyde Bruckman
During America’s Civil War, Union spies steal engineer Johnny Gray's beloved locomotive, 'The General'—with Johnnie's lady love aboard an attached boxcar—and he single-handedly must do all in his power to both get The General back and to rescue Annabelle.
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What critics compared The General to
Those cartoonish aspects are riotously reinforced, though, in a climactic train sequence that’s as much a straightforward action showstopper as it is a tribute to Buster Keaton’s The General , with Ethan and others frantically attempting to reckon with a runaway locomotive careens toward a ravine.
Once the train gets going, we see how everything gets set up to build for the moment where McQuarrie and Cruise get to a climactic moment that pays homage to Buster Keaton’s “The General,” but with a modern twist.
After that, the narrative doesn’t reach that same high tension, though action fans will surely lap up two exceptional extended set-pieces—an elaborate car chase through Rome and a pulsating Orient Express finale that cinephiles with a good knowledge of film history would surely cite The General (1926) as ‘inspiration’.
A climactic train sequence even calls The General to mind.
There are passing tributes to Buster Keaton (seen in a beautifully restored clip from The General ) and Harold Lloyd (whose famous dangling stunt work in the 1923 Safety Last! is echoed in a scene featuring Hugo in peril high atop the station clock tower).
What was revealing to me was the laugh from the audience when a critical scene from Keaton’s own 1926 classic “The General” flashed on the screen.
When it comes to comedy, Paddington 2 draws inspiration from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, both who gets nods in this with allusions to The General and Modern Times.
There are bows to battle, the sensational stuntwork of silent films (Leone even referenced Buster Keaton’s The General in the “bridge” sequence), the existential character pieces that were permeating the 1960s, and the old-fashioned flourishes that made Tinseltown’s trappings the worldwide standard.
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In terms of pure kinetic energy, you’d have to go back to Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and, before that, maybe Buster Keaton’s “The General” to find its equal.
Like Buster Keaton's “The General,” the movie basically consists of two long, astounding, impeccably designed chase scenes.
The John Wick series has never been shy about being a multi-million dollar stuntman exhibition, a salon on the balletic nature of stunt choreography – Chapter 3 deigns to show footage of Buster Keaton’s The General on a screen in Times Square in its opening minutes, while recurrent footage of actual ballet hammers home the similarities between the two art forms.
…and The General for showing the world how mass destruction can become oddly delightful.
Dream of Keaton in The General or Clint Eastwood riding an engine into a saloon in Joe Kidd.
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Occasionally the set pieces are as sharp as the Stooges are dumb, thanks to the rough craftsmanship of directors Del Lord and Charley Chase and writers Felix Adler and Clyde Bruckman — a famous gagman for three decades, and co-director of Buster Keaton’s immortal silent comedy The General.
Two other films that come to mind are Buster Keaton's "The General" (1926) and Andrei Konchalovsky's " Runaway Train " (1985), which won Oscar nominations for the two men in its locomotive, Jon Voight and Eric Roberts .