Roger Ebert called this classic Prime Video comedy a ‘masterpiece’

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In the 1980s, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel wrested the title of “reference film critics” in the United States from Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. They became television stars through “Sneak Previews” on PBS, and their influence exploded when they were broadcast nationally with their binary thumbs up/down rating system. It was odd that two Chicago-based critics would gain national notoriety, but their banter was an acerbic joy to witness — especially when it seemed like they were about to come to blows over a piece of studio paper like “Cop and a Half.”

The Siskel-Ebert shtick had several drawbacks (expertly covered in Matt Singer’s indispensable book) “Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel and Ebert Changed Movies Forever”), but it was particularly lamentable that they were so closely linked to the present. Unless an old film gets a major re-release, they rarely get a chance to speak on the classics. They finally made time for notable video releases of older films, but I really wanted to hear what they thought about vintage screwball comedies, cold blacks around the heartor silent pioneers.

The Internet has brought us a lot of misery over the past thirty years, but in the nascent era of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, it gave city dwellers unfettered access to newspapers from around the world. And when I realized I could read Roger Ebert’s latest reviews every week, I was thrilled. No member of the legacy media embraced the medium more enthusiastically than Ebert. He was already prolific, but his writing output exploded at that point. He was suddenly free to write about his favorite films, and he was never more eloquent than when he published a four-star praise for Buster Keaton’s expensive silent film “The General” calling it a “masterpiece”.

Charlie Chaplin has long been hailed as the master of silent comedy, and that’s a completely reasonable position! But the first time I saw Buster Keaton’s “The General,” my allegiance was forever pledged to the Great Stone Face. And although Keaton’s measured expressiveness diverged from that of his contemporaries (who also included the great Harold Lloyd), Ebert, in his 1997 review of probably the greatest comedy ever made, rightly attributed to the star’s nickname. “Buster Keaton was not so much the Great Stone Face as a man who kept his cool in the midst of chaos,” Ebert wrote.

There are no films more chaotic than “The General.” Set during the United States Civil War, Keaton’s 1926 film focuses on the romantic woes of Johnnie Gray, a Southern railroad engineer who loses the affections of his true love, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), when he is unable to enlist in the Confederate Army (problematic, yes, but the conflict is essentially just window dressing). He gets the chance to redeem himself when Union soldiers hijack the titular train and kidnap Annabelle in the process. From this point on, it’s one long train chase.

How to generate enthusiasm and laughter from vehicles stuck on a fixed lane? By Ebert:

“It would seem logically difficult to have a chase involving trains, since they have to stay on the tracks, and so one must always be behind the other – right? Keaton defies logic with one ingenious silent comedy sequence after another, and it is important to note that he never used a body double and performed all of his own stunts, even the most dangerous, with calm acrobatic grace.”

Action superstar Jackie Chan took a lot of inspiration from Keaton. You get the same daredevil thrill from “Police Story” and “Project A” that you get from “The General” and “Our Hospitality” (another Keaton plot twist that I might prefer to the first). This is why, as Ebert notes in his review, Keaton’s films have generally aged much better than Chaplin’s (although “The Great Dictator” is unfortunately current as we face a rising tide of global fascism that echoes the same events that inspired Chaplin’s masterpiece). Like Ebert, I will always remain in awe of the sequence where Keaton, stuck on the cowcatcher of a high-speed train, prevents a derailment by throwing a railway tie to dislodge another placed in his path.

“The General” is a model of “and then” storytelling. How long can a sequence be stretched out, with unexpected obstacles piling up one after the other, before reaching the narrative climax? No one ever did it better than Keaton, and I’m so glad I was able to read at length Ebert’s thoughts on such an essential classic. If you’ve never seen “The General”, you’re in for a treat: it’s now streaming on Prime Video. And then you have “Sherlock Jr.”, “The Cameraman” and “Seven Chances” (where you see Keaton almost flattened by rocks), among others, waiting for you.