Star Ledger: Back on the tracks with Buster Keaton

[Bruce Calvert]

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/inde ... uster.html

Back on the tracks with Buster Keaton
By Star-Ledger Staff
November 06, 2009, 2:15PM
By Mark Voger
Star-Ledger Staff

Two things mattered to Johnnie Gray: his girl and his train.

And though he was a bit on the clumsy-and-meek side, if you dared to steal his train — and his girl happened to be on board — well, you just messed with the wrong conductor.

The unlikely hero of Buster Keaton’s Civil War-themed silent epic, “The General” (1926), rides the rails again in a comprehensive Blu-ray release from Kino International ($34.95). The extras are edifying and plentiful, but it is Keaton’s film — still a thrill-a-minute classic, eight decades after its first bow — that is the star of the package.

Kino’s print, in sepia with several blue-tinted scenes, is clear and crisp. DVD extras include three scores, a photo gallery, a compilation of train sequences from other Keaton films and a tour of locations used in “The General.”

Two late artists of note filmed TV introductions for “The General” which are included on Kino’s disc: Keaton’s fellow actor-director, Orson Welles, and another face from the silent era, Gloria Swanson. Puffing on a cigar in color footage from 1971, Welles calls “The General” one of the greatest movies of all time. “I think it is the Civil War movie,” Welles says. “A hundred times more stunning visually than ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ” Swanson’s intro, filmed in the ’60s in black-and-white, elicits unintended chuckles. Swanson’s diction and mannerisms are, well, Norma Desmond-esque. (Buffs will recall Keaton’s bittersweet cameo as Desmond’s fellow washed-up silent star in Billy Wilder’s 1950 black comedy, “Sunset Boulevard.”)

A vaudevillian since he could toddle, Keaton performed his own stunts — “acrobatics” seems a more appropriate term — after working them out with mathematical precision. He developed his onscreen persona — an unassuming everyman who would stop at nothing to win the girl — in a series of comical two-reel shorts. Keaton was nicknamed the “great stoneface” for his penchant for underplaying in the face of chaos. When he made the transition to long-form features, his character acquired an aura of quiet poignance.

It all led to Keaton’s masterpiece, “The General,” which he co-wrote and co-directed with longtime partner Clyde Bruckman. (The title refers to a train, not a military leader.)

Though Keaton was a clown, you can’t call “The General” a mere comedy, but rather a war epic spiked with comedy. We laugh at the cow-catcher gag, the lumber gag, the water silo gag and the cannonball gag, but with an awareness that they are framed by a desperate struggle for survival.

The breathtaking flaming bridge, the pageantry of hundreds of uniformed extras on horses, and the loss of life in the battle sequences remind us that “The General,” though funny, reflects a grim chapter in American history.

[David B Pearson]

When were comedies ever "mere?"

[Richard M Roberts]

When were comedies ever "mere?"

Since asinine idiot snobs, in other words critics, roamed the earth.

RICHARD M ROBERTS