Today, courtesy of our friend Leeba, we took the kids into UCLA to see something cool. It was a silent film, The General (1927) starring Buster Keaton and accompanied by organ in Royce Hall. They have an awesome organ and the organist was something else too. The storyline is based on an event that took place during the civil war.

The narrative is about a group of Union saboteurs who steal a train from the Confederates and engage in a race to destroy track and burn bridges in their wake to prevent their use by an approaching Confederate army. In The General Keaton plays a tenacious railroad engineer in pursuit of the stolen engine in his own engine. He succeeds in stopping the saboteurs despite his many gaffes and pratfalls. Several months ago the boys and I rented a film from the library about the same story, told with the Union saboteurs as the main heroes. It was called The Great Locomotive Chase, and was made in 1956. Disney film, and pretty good.