The General

The General (1926) is Buster Keaton's Civil War silent comedy you can watch online on iFILM, co-directed with Clyde Bruckman. Keaton plays Johnny Gray, a Confederate railroad engineer with two loves: his locomotive, named The General, and a girl named Annabelle Lee.

When Union spies steal the train — with Annabelle trapped in a boxcar — Johnny chases it north alone, with no orders and no plan. What follows is one of the most physically demanding sequences in silent film history: a real locomotive running at full speed, real bridges being destroyed, and Keaton performing every stunt himself. The comedy lands hardest when everything seems about to go wrong and somehow doesn't.

The film flopped on release but was reappraised over the decades into one of the benchmarks of American cinema. The AFI ranks it among the greatest comedies ever made. Watch The General (1926) online on iFILM.