The General

Buster Keaton's masterpiece, and a strong contender for the greatest comedy ever made. Based loosely on a true Civil War incident, Keaton plays Johnnie Gray, a Southern railroad engineer whose two great loves — his locomotive ("The General") and his sweetheart — are both stolen by Union spies, launching an epic chase across the Georgia countryside. The film is a marvel of escalating spectacle: Keaton performed all his own stunts, including the most expensive single shot in silent film history (a real locomotive crashing through a burning bridge), and his deadpan determination in the face of increasingly impossible odds is endlessly, inexhaustibly funny. A commercial disappointment in 1926, it is now universally recognized as one of the pinnacle achievements of American cinema — and the action-comedy template that Hollywood has been chasing ever since.