Were it filmed today, the set piece of Buster Keaton’s The Gen­er­al (watch it online here) would sure­ly be com­put­er gen­er­at­ed.

The stu­dio would insist upon that.

We like to think Keaton, who both direct­ed and starred, would fight them tooth and nail.

Elab­o­rate stunts thrilled him, and what could be more thrilling — or cost­ly — than send­ing a 26-ton loco­mo­tive over a burn­ing train tres­tle in hopes the struc­ture would crum­ble, plung­ing the loco­mo­tive into the riv­er below?

The fact that he had but one chance to get it right must’ve upped the ante in a good way.

The Cot­tage Grove, Ore­gon Sen­tinel report­ed that the silent leg­end, hav­ing spent the sum­mer film­ing on loca­tion in and around town, was “hap­py as a kid” to have nailed this most chal­leng­ing shot.

The mak­ing of silent film’s most expen­sive stunt seems like it would make an excel­lent sub­ject for a movie, but for the fact there was very lit­tle dra­ma sur­round­ing it.

Keaton ingra­ti­at­ed him­self with the res­i­dents of Cot­tage Grove, host­ing week­ly base­ball games and pre­sid­ing over the wed­ding recep­tion of a local and a crew mem­ber. 1500 locals — half the town’s pop­u­la­tion — found work behind the scenes or as extras.

His rela­tion­ship with his his 24-year-old costar, Sen­nett Bathing Beau­ty Mar­i­on Mack, was strict­ly pro­fes­sion­al.

When his wife raised objec­tions to his plans to ride the loco­mo­tive across the tres­tle as cam­eras rolled, he capit­u­lat­ed, installing a papi­er-mâche dum­my as engi­neer. (At least one of the 3000 spec­ta­tors who lined the banks to wit­ness the stunt was fooled, when the dummy’s sev­ered head float­ed past.)

And although the sequence cost a shock­ing­ly expen­sive $42,000 — rough­ly $600,000 in today’s mon­ey — it left lit­tle to chance. Car­pen­ters spent two weeks build­ing a 215-foot-long tres­tle 34 feet above the Row Riv­er, then sawed part­way through the sup­port­ing struc­tures to make them extra vul­ner­a­ble to the explo­sive charge that would be trig­gered soon after action was called. Engi­neers con­struct­ed a down­stream dam so the water lev­el would be high enough to receive the train.

The com­mu­ni­ty was so invest­ed by the time cam­eras rolled, the local gov­ern­ment declared July 23 a hol­i­day, so the entire town would be free to attend. (The Sen­tinel not­ed how ear­li­er in the sum­mer Keaton him­self approached overzeal­ous onlook­ers to “cour­te­ous­ly request, ‘Will you please stand back so as not to cast a shad­ow on the pic­ture?’”)

The stunt went off with­out a hitch, its one and only take cap­tured by six strate­gi­cal­ly posi­tioned cam­era­men, but The Gen­er­al, one of the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute’s top 20 films of all time and Keaton’s per­son­al favorite, flopped with both crit­ics and the pub­lic. Its domes­tic box office returns were a mere $50,000 above the $750,000 it cost to make. It caused stu­dios to rethink how much con­trol to grant Keaton.

The train remained where it had land­ed until WWII, when it was fished up and sal­vaged for its iron. Accord­ing to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Cot­tage Grove His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, a few left­over pieces of track and steel were still vis­i­ble as recent­ly as 2006. A mur­al in town com­mem­o­rates The Gen­er­al, its star, and the 10 weeks of 1926 when Cot­tage Grove was the “HOLLYWOOD OF OREGON” (or so the Cot­tage Grove Sen­tinel claimed at the time.)

The Gen­er­al enjoys a ster­ling rep­u­ta­tion with silent film buffs, though its Civ­il War sto­ry­line is out of step with 2021 — Keaton’s char­ac­ter aspires to join the Con­fed­er­a­cy, and the Union sol­diers are the bad guys whose train plum­mets into the Row.

Per­haps nos­tal­gia will shift to Cot­tage Grove’s role in Stand By Me — anoth­er pic­ture in which trains loom large.

Fail­ing that, the Cham­ber of Com­merce has a repli­ca of Ani­mal House’s Death­mo­bile they could put on dis­play …

Learn more about the film­ing of The General’s most cel­e­brat­ed scene and Keaton’s vis­it to Cot­tage Grove in Julien Smith’s fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle for the Alta Jour­nal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

31 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Cour­tesy of The Lon­don Review of Books, you can now watch Eric Hob­s­bawm: The Con­so­la­tions of His­to­ry:

In this doc­u­men­tary, Antho­ny Wilks traces the con­nec­tions between the events of Eric Hob­s­bawm’s life and the his­to­ry he told, from his teenage years in Ger­many and his com­mu­nist mem­ber­ship, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the mak­ings of New Labour, tak­ing in Ital­ian ban­dits, Peru­vian peas­ant move­ments and the devel­op­ment of nation­al­ism in the mod­ern world, with help from the assid­u­ous obser­va­tions of MI5. The film fea­tures con­tri­bu­tions from Frances Stonor Saun­ders, Richard J. Evans, John Foot, Ste­fan Colli­ni, Mar­lene Hob­s­bawm and Don­ald Sas­soon, as well as Hob­s­bawm him­self in exten­sive archive footage.

To learn more about Hob­s­bawm, read the 2019 New York­er pro­file “Eric Hob­s­bawm, the Com­mu­nist Who Explained His­to­ry.”

The film will be added to our list of online doc­u­men­taries and our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

5 Free Online Cours­es on Marx’s Cap­i­tal from Prof. David Har­vey

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Course

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

To under­stand why Cit­i­zen Kane has for so long been referred to as the “great­est film of all time,” sim­ply watch any film made before it. Glib though that often-made pre­scrip­tion may sound, it gets at a truth about Orson Welles’ tale of the rise and fall of an Amer­i­can media mag­nate, his first and by far his most high­ly regard­ed pic­ture, now just days from the eight­i­eth anniver­sary of its pre­miere. “Its impact on cin­e­ma was so pro­found, and its tech­niques became so ubiq­ui­tous, that its once-rad­i­cal ideas now seem com­mon­place,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Youtube series One Hun­dred Years of Cin­e­ma, whose episode on the year 1941 could hard­ly have focused on any oth­er movie.

Among Cit­i­zen Kane’s most vis­i­ble inno­va­tions is cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Gregg Toland’s use of deep focus, which allows Welles and his col­lab­o­ra­tors to make con­stant nar­ra­tive use of every visu­al detail. This encour­ages the audi­ence to “read the whole frame at once, much in the same way that one would read a paint­ing, each lay­er adding an ele­ment to the sto­ry.”

More sub­tly, “what sep­a­rat­ed Citi­zen Kane from the kind of films that pre­ced­ed it was the over­all ambiva­lence of its tone. It’s a film about one of the wealth­i­est, most suc­cess­ful men in the world, and yet per­me­at­ing the entire film is the gloom of fail­ure.” The lega­cy of these and oth­er dar­ing artis­tic choic­es man­i­fest in the work of sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of direc­tors, includ­ing such names cit­ed in the brief Fan­dor video essay above as Quentin Taran­ti­no, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Wes Ander­son, and Steven Spiel­berg.

“The cre­ators of Cit­i­zen Kane had the free­dom to play and inno­vate,” says Michael Aran­da in the episode of Crash Course Film Crit­i­cism above. “Many of their tech­ni­cal exper­i­ments changed the way film was being used as a sto­ry­telling medi­um — which, arguably, could be anoth­er way to define ‘great­ness.’ ” Welles him­self put it dif­fer­ent­ly: “There is a great gift that igno­rance has to bring to any­thing. That was the gift I brought to Kane, igno­rance.” Of course, he had the good excuse of being 25 years old, although already more than estab­lished on the stage and the radio. When Hol­ly­wood came call­ing, he brought his cre­ative­ly spir­it­ed Mer­cury The­atre Play­ers with­in to make use of the rel­a­tive­ly vast pro­duc­tion resources avail­able at RKO Pic­tures. One of Welles’ col­lab­o­ra­tors in par­tic­u­lar has recent­ly been back in the pub­lic eye: Her­man J. Mankiewicz, who’d pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten scripts for Welles’ Camp­bell Play­house series on CBS Radio.

David Fincher’s bio­graph­i­cal dra­ma Mank, which won a cou­ple of Acad­e­my Awards last week­end, tells the sto­ry of the trou­bled screen­writer’s involve­ment with Cit­i­zen Kane. Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by Fincher’s father, Mank drew its first inspi­ra­tion from “Rais­ing Kane,” a 1971 essay by New York­er film crit­ic Pauline Kael that famous­ly depict­ed Mankiewicz, not Welles, as Cit­i­zen Kane’s pri­ma­ry author. Sub­se­quent schol­ar­ship, as explained in the Roy­al Ocean Film Soci­ety video above, has revealed that Kael was labor­ing under a mis­ap­pre­hen­sion (if not a grudge). But the fact remains that all the par­tic­i­pants in Cit­i­zen Kane did their bit to great­ly advance the medi­um of cin­e­ma, and for the young Welles the pic­ture became proof of his artis­tic matu­ri­ty: a mas­ter­piece, in the orig­i­nal sense.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­work (1945): “Cit­i­zen Kane Is Not Cin­e­ma”

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

How Orson Welles’ F for Fake Teach­es Us How to Make the Per­fect Video Essay

What Makes Ver­ti­go the Best Film of All Time? Four Video Essays (and Mar­tin Scors­ese) Explain

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“Reg­u­lar fea­tures of the time: neat­ly swept-up piles of glass, lit­ter of stone and splin­ters of flint, smell of escap­ing gas, knots of sight­seers wait­ing at the cor­dons.”

– George Orwell

What was it like to live in Lon­don dur­ing and after the Blitz? George Orwell’s note­books from the time con­tain a “fas­ci­nat­ing account of every­day life in Lon­don dur­ing the Sec­ond World War,” full of jour­nal­is­tic detail, the British Library writes. In Orwell’s esti­ma­tion, the city was riv­en with class divides. “Despite his crit­i­cism of Stal­in­ism, Orwell remained a con­vinced social­ist all his life.” He believed the war could only be won if it turned into a rev­o­lu­tion. “When you see how the wealthy are still behav­ing, in what is man­i­fest­ly devel­op­ing into  a rev­o­lu­tion­ary war,” he wrote in a diary entry that would become the 1941 essay The Lion and the Uni­corn, “you think of St. Peters­burg in 1916.”

Orwell may have been wrong about the rev­o­lu­tion, but he report­ed hon­est­ly on much of what was hap­pen­ing in Lon­don. Mean­while, the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion pro­duced a short pro­pa­gan­da film in 1940 for the Amer­i­can pub­lic called “Lon­don Can Take It.” The tone was in keep­ing with the “Keep Calm and Car­ry On” ethos we asso­ciate with Britain in the peri­od. A com­pan­ion film, “Britain Can Take It,” sim­i­lar­ly sold the “illu­sion of social uni­ty,” Craig Stew­art Hunter writes, “cre­at­ed by the use of films and oth­er media to por­tray pos­i­tive morale.” (View many more British WWII pro­pa­gan­da films here.) These did not account for “grow­ing dis­en­chant­ment in urban areas, which found them­selves ‘unable to take it,’ so to speak.”

Peter Watts writes in The Guardian about once-vibrant city blocks that were demol­ished by the fire­bomb­ing, then lat­er turned into park­ing garages. Many of these neigh­bor­hoods were then, in the 1960s, fold­ed into mas­sive estate hous­ing projects with “high-rise tow­ers nobody want­ed to live in,” says Peter Larkham, pro­fes­sor of plan­ning at Birm­ing­ham School of the Built Envi­ron­ment. Could Lon­don take it? It depend­ed on which Lon­don one meant, in the long run. But dur­ing the war itself, there was per­haps more social cohe­sion than Orwell was will­ing to grant, giv­en that some­thing like one in every six Lon­don­ers suf­fered home­less­ness dur­ing the bomb­ing cam­paign and over 40,000 civil­ians lost their lives.

The degree of Britain’s nation­al uni­ty dur­ing the war remains “a con­tin­u­ing his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal debate,” writes Hunter, ever since” the gen­er­a­tion of his­to­ri­ans born after the war… have been able to write with more crit­i­cal detach­ment.” And since most every­one alive then is no longer, ideas about what it felt like to be in Lon­don dur­ing WWII will change as his­to­ri­ans view the source mate­r­i­al dif­fer­ent­ly over time.

But thanks to pho­tog­ra­phy and film from the peri­od, we’ll always have a fair­ly good idea of what Lon­don looked like dur­ing the war, though we’ll have to make do, until the AI “becomes more mature,” as the poster of the video com­pi­la­tion above notes, with infe­ri­or col­oriza­tion tech­niques. (Yes, they know, the bus­es should be red.)

The var­i­ous scenes have been motion-sta­bi­lized, slight­ly speed-cor­rect­ed, enhanced and col­orized by means of sophis­ti­cat­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence soft­ware. 

The film shows remark­able scenes of bomb dam­age, close up film­ing of the release of bar­rage bal­loons, anti-air­craft gun posi­tions, traf­fic at Trafal­gar Square, Pic­cadil­ly Cir­cus, mil­i­tary parades in front of Buck­ing­ham Palace, beau­ti­ful scenes of the Thames dur­ing day­time and at dusk, Water­loo Sta­tion, and much more.

Most of the film dates from late 1943, but some of the footage of Water­loo sta­tion and Pic­cadil­ly Cir­cus comes from the late 1930s and it ends with a minute of VE day on 8 May 1945. All of the footage comes from the Prelinger Archives. Can we see nation­al uni­ty in the crowds of peo­ple going about their busi­ness amidst a city full of arma­ments and rub­ble? Is it vis­i­ble to the naked eye? See time­stamped descrip­tions of the loca­tion and action in each clip at the video’s YouTube page here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

WWII Britain Revis­it­ed in 120 Short Films, Now Free on the Web

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

How to Behave in a British Pub: A World War II Train­ing Film from 1943, Fea­tur­ing Burgess Mered­ith

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

How the Fences & Rail­ings Adorn­ing London’s Build­ings Dou­bled (by Design) as Civil­ian Stretch­ers in World War II

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness