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"I like to see it lap the Miles..." Poetry of trains, cf. Gance's La Roue, the title is the name of the locomotive that is the true love of the Georgia engineer (Buster Keaton), its rival is the local belle (Marion Mack). The Civil War brings double rejection, from the enlisting office in need of railroad specialists and from the sweetheart who smells a coward. "I don't want you to speak to me again until you are in uniform." Northern spies trigger the quest, a matter of hunter and hunted taking turns for an extended chase across enemy lines, a matchlessly beautiful horizontal construction. On foot, aboard a handcar and astride a bicycle until he reaches the stolen iron horse, the hero has the juggler's grave concentration yet is so focused that he misses the mammoth Griffithian panorama behind him. Men and machines in the wilderness, throwing beams of wood from the cowcatcher and dodging a cannon barrel with a mind of its own. The camera's eye is a hole burned in a white tablecloth, the heroine is framed lyrically through it before getting crammed into a sack of shoes and drenched by a water tower. "Occupation?" "Soldier." Keaton's masterpiece of masterpieces, the point at which kinetic geometry becomes spiritual ballet. The creature of continuous motion suddenly stops to blink at a vanishing boxcar, he chops off the back of the caboose and gets a frame within a frame, the opponent approaches like nothing so much as L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. Cinema's grand, streamlined action canvas, a documentary about the peril of its own production—real locomotives plunge off real burning bridges, the Union officer ponders the fruit of his misjudged strategy and orders the troops onward with a dispirited wave of his saber. The civilian gets his stripes but Keaton's closing joke marvelously deflates militaristic grandiosity, a salute is just something that gets in the way of a kiss. "If you lose this war, don't blame me." With Glen Cavender, Charles Henry Smith, Frederick Vroom, Jim Farley, and Joe Keaton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |