Gray Area

At the A.V. Club they've got "Gateways To Geekery," little guides for getting into pop culture. Here's one for Buster Keaton. It recommends The General as a useful entry point, and then Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Sherlock Jr . You can't go wrong with any of these, but I find it odd they warn against The Cameraman. I think it stands up as well as any of his silent features.

The discussion of The General notes it's set "during the U.S. Civil War—with Keaton’s hero, interestingly enough, on the side of the South..."

This relates to something I wrote about Disraeli (1929). Old films are windows into old attitudes. The A.V. Club writer seems surprised that Keaton's working for the South. It would be surprising if he weren't. Everyone agreed slavery was wrong, but the mainstream view was also that the South was horribly wronged because of the Civil War and Reconstruction. One of the biggest hit movies of the silent era was The Birth Of A Nation, which made heroes of the Ku Klux Klan.

Indeed, Keaton based his film on an incident where a Northern spy went behind Southern lines. But, Keaton believed, there was no way to make the South the bad guys in a Civil War film, so he changed sides.