What A Difference A Piano Makes: Buster Keaton's The General

Posted on Friday October 1, 2010, 11:22 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States

This isn't a blog with a particularly great argument or point*. It's more a What I Did On My Holidays sort of blog - so if you're not into accounts of watching silent comedy, look away now. The thing is that I went to see Buster Keaton's The General last night at the Prince Charles cinema, just off Leicester Square. The kicker of this particular performance was that they had a live piano accompaniment by a very talented man called John Sweeney, adding a whole extra layer of funny to the multi-storeyed humour-cake that is Keaton's work**. He nailed that familiar tinkly-tonk sound you've heard in the background of hundreds of period-set films, breaking into snatches of the Battle Hymn of the Republic or Dixie as appropriate at various times in the Civil War-set saga and providing quite the best soundtrack to the film I can even imagine. I'm thinking of starting a petition to get more films accompanied by live music.

The film itself is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly brilliant. I expected great physical comedy of Keaton, of course, but the sheer scale of it still amazed me. Many of the stunts he pulls in this film are genuinely hair-raising, the kind of thing that would leave heart in mouth even in a modern film where you were 90 percent sure that the train travelling towards the dude was CG anyway. Here, knowing that it's A TRAIN, it's just breathtaking. What's more, many of these sequences are so flat-out brilliant that you have to wonder how many takes were needed to get the sleeper to fall just right, or land that cannonball just so. The film cost a fortune when it was made, and every penny is onscreen. The crashes, the stunts, the huge crowd scenes - it's flat-out ma-hoo-sive. After watching this, I'm not sure that Unstoppable holds any great shakes for me. Keaton manages to mount, dismount, stop and start his train about a hundred times in this movie, so I can't imagine why Denzel and Chris are having any problems at all.

What I hadn't really seen before was how witty Keaton was even when he wasn't being physical. The film has him in pursuit of spies who have stolen his train (and his girlfriend) and are determined to sabotage the railroads of the South. Keaton's Johnny Gray has been heroically, single-handedly clearing the tracks of all the obstacles the bad guys throw at him, including a boxcar. Having gotten rid of said boxcar, he bends down to refill the engine with wood - and reemerges to see another boxcar on the tracks ahead of him (which they've released behind them). The flat, disbelieving stare that follows is perfectly pitched for maximum humour, but is surpassed a second or two later when he looks down once again and emerges to find that that second boxcar has run off the rails on its own and disappeared. Blinking, Johnny wonders if he's starting to see things, questions his sanity and gets back to business - with a single stare and a shake of the head. What a guy.

For a better taste of some of the things he gets up to in the film (and believe me, this is not all the best bits), and for the line, "The cameraman had orders to keep shooting until Buster yelled cut, or was killed", try this tiny featurette:



And if you don't believe my recommendation, this guy has a public service announcement that might convince you.



In short, if it ever screens at a cinema, film festival or DVD store near you, sort it out. Oh, and if you have any Twilight fans in the family, make 'em go see another silent classic, Nosferatu, at the Prince Charles next month, again with live music. It'll shock 'em straight and get them over that vampire thing once and for all.

*No change there, then, I hear you cry.
*That metaphor got away from me slightly. Mmmm, cake.