Buster Keaton always said that this was his favorite movie.

Buster Keaton shot most of this film outdoors in Oregon because the narrow-gauge railroad tracks that could accommodate antique locomotives were still in use at the time.

Buster Keaton wanted to use the real locomotive "The General" in the movie which was at the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Depot in Chattanooga, Tennessee (it's in Kennesaw, Georgia now), but was unable to, and had to dress up another 4-4-0 locomotive instead.

Joseph M. Schenck gave Buster Keaton $400,000 for the movie, so the production company moved with 18 freight cars of props and sets to Oregon. In the next two months the town of Marrietta, Georgia, was built, near the Oregon town of Cottage Grove.

500 Oregon National Guardsmen play the 2 armies.

A number of celebrities have cameos in this film: Glen Cavender had been a hero in the Spanish-American War. Also, Frederick Vroom had appeared earlier in Keaton's The Navigator as the girl's father whose ship is hijacked. Keaton's former director of photography, Elgin Lessley, has a cameo as the Union general who gives the command to cross the burning bridge. Producer Louis Lewyn has a bit part as a soldier.

Based on a true incident during the Civil War. In April 1862, Union agent James J. Andrews led a squad of 21 soldiers on a daring secret raid. Dressed in civilian clothes, Andrews and his men traveled by rail into the Southern states. Their mission was to sabotage rail lines and disrupt the Confederate army's supply chain. At the town of Little Shanty, GA, the raiders stole a locomotive known as "The General." They headed north, tearing up track, burning covered bridges and cutting telegraph lines along the way. William Fuller and Jeff Cain, the conductor and engineer of "The General," pursued the stolen train by rail and foot. They first used a hand-cart (as Buster Keaton does in the film), then a small work locomotive called "The Yonah," which they borrowed from a railroad work crew, and finally a full-sized Confederate army locomotive called "The Texas," which pursued "The General" for 51 miles - in reverse. During the chase, Confederate soldiers were able to repair the sabotaged telegraph wires and send messages ahead of the raiders. Andrews and his men were intercepted and captured near Chattanooga, TN, by a squad of Confederate troops led by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest (who, after the war, was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan). Tried as spies, Andrews and seven of his raiders were hanged (a special gallows was built to hold al

Florida State University commissioned composer Jeff Beal to write a brand-new soundtrack for this silent film. It was premiered by the University Philharmonia along with the original film playing just above the orchestra.




In the train crash a dummy was used as engineer. It looks so realistic that the townspeople who had come to watch screamed in horror.

Included among the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die', edited by Steven Jay Schneider.


The film upon release was a box office disaster and received negative reviews. in response to that, the studio told Buster Keaton that he was now restricted to movie making. After this, the studio would not let him make his own movies, he had to do what the studio gave him to make.

The film's hard-edged look was inspired by the battlefield photographs of Matthew Brady, which captured the carnage of the Civil War in shocking detail.



