Consistently ranked among the greatest films ever made, Buster Keaton's The General is so brilliantly conceived and executed that it continues to inspire awe and laughter with every viewing. This Kino Ultimate 2 Disc Edition was mastered in HS from a 35mm archive print struck from the original camera negative.

Rejected by the Confederate army as unfit, and taken for a coward by his beloved Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), young Johnny Gray (Keaton) is given a chance to redeem himself when Yankee spies steal his cherished locomotive. Johnny wages a one-man war against hijackers, an errant cannon and the unpredictable hand of fate while roaring along the iron rails. "Every shot has the authenticity and the unassuming correct composition of a Matthew Brady Civil War photograph", wrote film historian David Robinson, "No one - not even Griffith or Huston and certainly not Fleming (Gone With the Wind) - caught the visual aspect of the Civil War as Keaton did."

Also Includes: The Playhouse (1921, 23 min., mono), a technical tour-de-force in which Keaton plays every member of a stage company, the entire audience and an undisciplined chimp to boot! Cops (1922, 18 min., mono) is the quintessential chase film, with Buster tumbling into a series of marvelous mishaps while fleeing hundreds of uniformed policemen.

The two things engineer Johnny Gray (Buster Keaton) loves most in the world are his Southern belle sweetheart and his locomotive. When Northern spies steal the latter, the intrepid Confederate single-handedly takes on the entire Union army in order to get it back. Against a backdrop of magnificently photographed Civil War battle scenes unfolds one of the great chases in movie history. Set almost entirely aboard moving trains, Keaton's THE GENERAL is physical comedy refined to elegant perfection and widely considered to be the actor-director's greatest film.