On G List of Movie Reviews
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The General (1926)
Rate:
2
Viewed:
9/15
9/15:
For reasons that are incomprehensible to me, The General has been voted as one of the best films made.
Advertised as a comedy, it has left me bored to tears. Mmm, am I hearing the baa-baa sounds from the public to make sure
nobody says otherwise? Well, I'm not going to be one of them. In fact, The General was a box-office failure when it
first came out, and everybody found the picture unbelievably tedious.
It would be another four years before the war masterpiece,
All Quiet on the Western Front, was released.
The difference in quality of filmmaking between these two is wide and deep. Although The General is a silent picture,
I knew what to expect before seeing it, and my expectations were met.
It moves too slow, and hardly anything happens. Every scene takes twenty minutes when one suffices. In fact, it should've been
a ten-minute picture. There's no story whatsoever: just a bunch of random stuff that happens to take place on the railroad.
It repeats ad nauseam to the point that I'm all railroaded out. Also, the film does a great disservice to the soldiers who
fought in the Civil War.
All in all, don't believe the hype about The General because it's anything but.