Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This Thursday at 7 PM, University of Chicago Doc Films will screen The General, Buster Keaton’s most famous comedy. In his review for the Reader, Dave Kehr writes, “Buster Keaton may have made more significant films, but The General stands as an almost perfect entertainment.” Films like Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator rank among his best and most important work, but The General isn’t without its share of intrigue. The stuff that made made Keaton such a visionary performer and director—his fluid merging of physical action with emotional pathos, his “man-on-a-mission” narrative framework—can be found throughout the film. With the General itself, a speeding locomotive that operates as both physical obstacle and metaphor, he also solidified the theme of man versus machine that would come to define him.
