Movie review on "The General"

                                                   Movie review on "The General"



              I normally don't enjoy silent movies, but the movie The General was quite different from what i have seen before.   From watching the movie, I have been able to view, and understand the concept of telling a story with out any dialogue.

       Jonnie Gray was a very smart and intelligent man, he worked as a train engineer and had the love of his life right by his side. Or so he thought.

  Jonnie Gray, who wanted to serve in the army but was denied because his career position was already to valuable to the town. At first, he thought he was declined because he was much smaller than your average man.  After he was denied access to the army, Annabelle Lee told him that since he was not a part of the towns army, she would not love him anymore. I felt that this was not very fair as Annabelle Lee did not understand the full story, about what had happened that day. She though that he didn't even try to get into the army, which was obviously not the case.

   Jonnie later went on a train ride with Annabelle Lee, and got off at a train stop.Little did they know, the opposing town was planning on stealing the train that they were on at a near by stop. I thought this was a good use of foreshadowing, because film was just starting to build, and not many people in 1926 would know how to use this properly.

   When the opposing town came to steal the train, Annabelle Lee was still on the train, and about to get off when they came and kidnapped her, along with the train. Jonnie was soon aware of this and hopped on another train and started to follow the kidnappers. Jonnie was a very brave mam for trying to save someone in that situation, and i thought he was especially a good man for not holding grudges about what Annabelle had said to him earlier. The chase scenes in this movie took up about 90% of the film, and sometimes it got boring because the two opposing trains involved in the chase were trying to create obstacles to further their time in getting away quicker.

     As the story progressed, the use of special effects, props, and explosions got even more intriguing. I though that for a movie made in the 20's it was extremely well done. As Jonnie was chasing the stolen train, the camera kept up with their every move, and never failed to miss a shot. the use of explosions was almost unreal, because that was a very hard task to achieve back then. I wont tell anymore of the story because it is a great film that i think everybody should watch
  
      Every time there was an explosion, they had to do it in real life because they had no access to editing, or computer generated explosions etc. In certain times of the movie, they had to blow up objects, burn down object, fire cannons or shoot bullets. I am still wondering how they were able to achieve this with so Little experience with movies back then.

   I thought the characters were very believable because they were around the same skill levels of actors from our generation in my opinion. At times they did over-react to certain situations, but i only think that this was on purpose, because of the fact that they had no sound in the 20's.

The film also used amazing sound effects, like for an example when something would fall on the ground, they would use a drum to create a loud "BOOM" and i personally thought this added to the movie, and made it more realistic, and believable.


   The character of Jonnie Gray was very heroic, i thought he was very brave for what he did because he risked his life for Annabelle Lee. He was probably my favourite character because i admire his concept for never giving up. Annabelle Lee on the other hand wasn't my favourite because i found that she didn't help much with trying to get away from the train robbers.


Over- all i really enjoyed this movie and would like to see more by this director because i think it was one of the first movies in the 1920's to impress people. It certainly impressed me.