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Select media
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Stills must not be reproduced, copied or downloaded in any way.
Film details
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Featuring
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Country
USA
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Year
1926
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Genres
Comedy Period drama
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Type
Film
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Category
Fiction
Introduction
“Abounding in gags whose ease and symmetry belie the elaboration of their staging, The General is the most perfectly proportioned and sustained of all silent comedies.”
David Robinson, Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980
Taking inspiration from a real Civil War incident when Union soldiers hijacked a Confederate train, The General was silent comedian Buster Keaton’s most grandly conceived project. The train driver who goes in dogged pursuit of his beloved engine is a classic Keaton character: stoical, determined and preternaturally straight-faced as chaos reigns around him.
The film is a seamless blend of action and comedy, involving a great number of stunts – including the famous sequence in which a bridge bearing a railroad train collapses into a gorge. The great expense that such moments incurred was remembered when the film was a commercial disaster, to the cost of Keaton’s future creative freedoms. Only decades later was The General recognised as one of silent cinema’s greatest comedies.
Keaton drew on another 19th-century incident, the notorious Hatfield-McCoy family feud of 1878–91, for his earlier masterpiece, Our Hospitality (1923).
Cast & Credits
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Cast
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Johnnie Gray
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boy who follows Johnnie
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boy who follows Johnnie
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Annabelle Lee
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Mr Lee, Annabelle's father
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Annabelle's brother
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recruiter
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Confederate general
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Captain Anderson, chief spy
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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raider
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Union General Thatcher
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Union officer
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Union officer
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Union officer
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Credits
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Unknown:
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Directed by
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Directed by
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©
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Production Company
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Distributed by
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Production Manager
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Location Manager
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Script/Titles
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Script/Titles
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Adapted by
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Adapted by
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Adap book 'The Great Locomotive Chase'
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Photographed by
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Photographed by
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Photography Assistant
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Stills Photography
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Lighting Effects
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Special Effects
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Editor
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Editor
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Editor
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Chief Mechanic
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Wardrobe/Make-up
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Wardrobe/Make-up
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Wardrobe/Make-up
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Technical Director
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