By Coral Gables Gazette staff

In 1926, the critics were merciless. The New York Times called it neither funny nor thrilling. Variety declared it a flop. One reviewer suggested that someone should have told Buster Keaton that it is difficult to derive laughter from the sight of men being killed in battle. “The General” cost more than any previous Keaton feature, made back far less, and effectively ended his creative independence in Hollywood. It won nothing. It sold nothing. And it is now ranked among the greatest films ever made.

One hundred years after its release, “The General” screens at the Coral Gables Art Cinema on Saturday, May 9, at 8:15 p.m., in a special anniversary presentation timed to National Train Day. The screening is part of the Cinema’s ongoing series of limited and one-time-only presentations.

The film and what makes it extraordinary

“The General” is based on an actual event — the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862, in which Union spies hijacked a Confederate train called the General in northern Georgia and attempted to disrupt Southern supply lines. Keaton cast himself as Johnnie Gray, the engineer who pursues the stolen locomotive across enemy territory and back, with his fiancée accidentally aboard the captured train. The premise is essentially a double chase — Johnnie pursuing the General northward, then fleeing south with the Union army in pursuit — and Keaton constructs it with the precision of a civil engineer and the physical courage of someone who appeared to have no particular interest in surviving the production.

The film is a seamless blend of action and comedy, involving a great number of stunts — including the famous sequence in which a bridge bearing a railroad train collapses into a gorge. Keaton performed those stunts himself, on real locomotives, on real tracks, at real speed. He hauled two vintage engines, remodeled railroad cars, Civil War artillery, more than 1,000 costumes, and all the equipment needed to shoot a film to Cottage Grove, Oregon, a small town in the Willamette Valley with railroad tracks left over from the lumber boom, where 500 members of the Oregon National Guard were outfitted as extras.

The result is something that has not been surpassed in a century of action filmmaking. The BFI called it “the high-water mark for action movies for close to a hundred years.” The Times of London, in the quote the Coral Gables Art Cinema is using to promote the screening, put it plainly: in an era when all risk is assumed by CGI effects, Keaton’s death-defying leaps are all the more breathtaking.

Orson Welles, who called Keaton the greatest of all the clowns in the history of cinema, was not overstating the case. In 1963, Keaton himself said: “I was more proud of that picture than any I ever made. Because I took an actual happening out of the history books, and I told the story in detail too.”

The failure that became a masterpiece

The arc from disaster to classic is itself part of the film’s legacy. It took decades for its reputation to rise from failure to classic. In 2012, it was ranked 35th in Sight and Sound’s “Greatest Films of All Time” poll, and it placed in the magazine’s top ten in 1972 and 1982. The American Film Institute ranks it 18th among the greatest American films ever made. What the critics of 1926 missed entirely — the stoic precision of Keaton’s physical comedy, the structural elegance of the double chase, the breathtaking integration of landscape and action — is now what film students study and filmmakers try to replicate.

Why this screening matters

Silent film on a large screen with an audience is a different experience from silent film on a laptop, and “The General” is specifically a film that rewards the communal viewing the cinema was built for. The locomotive sequences demand scale. The comedy demands shared timing. And a film that turns 100 this year, shown on a Saturday night in a city that values its cultural institutions, is an occasion worth marking.

The screening is presented in DCP format with English intertitles. Runtime is 79 minutes. Tickets are $8 for members and $11.75 for nonmembers.

Saturday, May 9 · 8:15 p.m. · Coral Gables Art Cinema · Members $8, nonmembers $11.75