Buster Keaton's The General (1926)

The General is a great parabola flung against the skyline, lifting on a first long curve that seems destined to go on forever, then gently and ominously curling in space to retrace its passage until it lands without loss of force in the hand that has set it in motion.
--Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (Knopf, 1975)

We are always looking for films that our whole family (ages eight to seventy-two) can enjoy and comedies are usually the best bet, so after sitting through Airplane (1980, with more directors than laughs, at least for me) and Peter Bogdanovich's Noises Off (an unfunny filming of a play, redeemed only slightly by Carol Burnett and Michael Caine) it was a delight for us to rediscover Buster Keaton's The General.  Airplane and Noises Off are what I call anarchic humor, with jokes piled on willy-nilly without regard for the situation.  The General is an elegant period film that I find quite funny, as an unstoppable Buster Keaton, rejected by the Confederate army, single-handedly chases his locomotive, The General, after it is stolen, with his love Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) aboard.   I have always said that the best comedies are not necessarily funny -- and Keaton's brilliant deadpan comedy does not appeal to everyone - but The General is also beautiful in its re-creation of an actual Civil War incident that includes romance and battlefield action.

I will not try to describe the many jokes and gags in the film because they are elaborately set up in the detailed narrative ; I will just mention that Keaton was obviously familiar with D. W. Griffith's films, not only because of relationships to Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) but also because of Keaton's appreciation of "the wind in the trees" as his train traverses the landscape, moving from Confederate territory into Union territory.  At one point Keaton hides under a table where Union officers are plotting and when one general burns a hole in the tablecloth one can see just Keaton's eye peeking out, with the one eye expressing a combination of curiosity and concern; then there is a cut to what Keaton is seeing, Annabelle as captive, framed as an iris shot through the hole in the tablecloth.