More Depressing Tales of Old Hollywood.
August 8th, 2006Neil and I went to see The General yesterday. We both had seen it before, but I was a frownie-face for the lacking of “more jokes.” That’s what I will say about all film classics… needs more jokes. We both appreciated Buster’s unmotivated “baseball slide” whenever he was running up to something.
The General is a comedic (well, slightly comedic… more jokes!) take on an actual event of the Civil War where a Confederate train was stolen by the Union to disrupt supply lines. Buster was a life-long train enthusiast and got the idea to make a Civil War set comedy after seeing the flashback scene in Grandma’s Boy... that’s right, the Adam Sandler produced granny-fucking “comedy” (more jokes!). (Actually, I wonder if Sandler named this piece of shit with the same title as Harold Lloyd’s movie to get back at his estate for suing him over plagurizing The Freshman in The Waterboy. Full disclosure: I hate Adam Sandler.)
Neil also mentioned that The General is a primary (or primary-and-a-half) source for Civil War research since it’s made in living memory of Civil War battles, while the photographs of the time only depict aftermath(s) of battles.
I still had Movie Crazy at home and thought it was retarded. Kirk was into it and had seen it before. But I discovered a weird connection… the credited director of this was Clyde Bruckman, who also directed The General, who also did gags for the Three Stooges and was considered this great gag writer back in the day(I also read that Buster Keaton wrote gags for the Marx Brothers after the sound era, but that’s neither here nor there), but by the ‘30s was an out of control drunk and the only person who gave him work was Harold Lloyd, who insisted on giving him credit even when he was too wasted to actually do anything. Ironically… or tragically, his last film job was contributing gags to this other movie but all his material was lifted from Movie Crazy and Harold sued him (a family legacy of lawsuits).
Broke and bottomed-out, he borrowed a gun from Buster Keaton, ate in a restaurant and realizing he couldn’t pay the bill, he went into the bathroom and shot himself (other versions have him shoot himself in the phone booth).
His name was used in an episode of The X Files (Peter Boyle played him), but the character isn’t meant to be him, as far as I can tell.
August 8th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I read that Buster became so knowledgable working with trains on The General that he developed the ability to figure out how long it would take a slowing train to come to a complete stop and could thereby make it appear as if he was personally halting the train by grabbing part of it and struggling against it in a perfectly timed manner.
But I think The General is overrated in the Keaton collection. I like the shorts better. And The Navigator for features.
August 9th, 2006 at 9:56 am
The Navigator is playing next Monday (with live piano at the 2 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. screenings).
August 9th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
The main General-related trivia I discovered in an article regards what seems like a simple gag in the movie—he doesn’t use enough gunpowder in the canon attached to the back of the train and the canonball tumbles harmlessly into the cab behind him as he’s driving. They had a lot of difficultly making the ball NOT overshoot the cab… they measured out the correct amount of gunpowder with tweezers after many botched takes.
I however, have 20 entries worth of Harold Lloyd trivia… but no one cares about that.
October 15th, 2006 at 9:09 am
It seems there are a lot of people that don’t like Sandler these days. I like most of his films. Haven’t seen Click yet but I am looking forward to it.