[When Fleming's Gone With the Wind was re-released in 1967, the distributors tried to "modernize" the film.]

An analogous thing has been done recently to Buster Keaton's silent comedy feature, The General…. And here the changes are even more serious, not least because The General, unlike Gone With the Wind, is a masterpiece by one of the great film-makers (perhaps the greatest film-maker of the silent era).

The distributors have made basically two kinds of change: one, the less serious, in the visuals; the other, far more serious, because fundamental, in the sound track. Both seem to have been carried out, at least in part, in the futile and misguided attempt to "modernize" the film, to make it seem less like a silent and a product of its period.

Let us deal first with the less serious change: the changing of the intertitles to subtitles superimposed over the images—and, in at least one case, the complete elimination of the text of an intertitle. The worst thing about the change is that the subtitles keep one from giving one's full attention to the images (this is of course also true with subtitles in foreign sound films, but there it is the lesser of two evils). Moreover, aesthetically speaking, most of the intertitles probably should be separate: at least those that contain, not a functional bit of dialogue, but a fairly independent joke (and aesthetically "impure" as written jokes are in a silent film, with Keaton these jokes are usually funny or charming). The change might—wrongly, I think—seem justified because, in eliminating the intertitles, it eliminates an annoyance presented by the intertitles in almost all silent films: they slow the film down inordinately because they are up there excruciatingly long (I can usually read them three times). But the solution is not subtitles: the solution is to shorten the length of time the intertitles are on the screen, leaving them up only as long as it takes everyone but cretins and illiterates to read them. (p. 39)

But the really terrible change is in the sound track: in the addition, along with the music, of realistic, quasi-synchronous sound. While Johnny is trying to escape silently with Annabelle from the Union headquarters, a window falls down on his hands: this print supplies the realistic sound of the window falling and landing. A group of soldiers takes aim, smoke rises from their guns, enemies fall dead: this print supplies the sound, as realistic as in any sound film, of the guns going off (indeed most of the realistic sound in this print is the sound of gunfire).

On the face of it this change offers us More, but in fact it gives us immeasurably Less, because it temporarily destroys the film at its roots—as it would with any silent comedy. For the absence of realistic sound is silent comedy's defining element, its very foundation. To add realistic sound is to destroy this foundation and throw off the delicate balance between stylization and realism that enables the comedy to work…. Although most of the audience will not be conscious of the process itself, at the point in The General when realistic sound comes in, it is as though a cloud has appeared and darkened the world of film. The stylized fantasy-world of silent comedy is temporarily gone and has been replaced by a much more realistic world: suddenly the pain is "real" pain, the deaths are "real" deaths; it is no longer the world Keaton gave us, it is no longer funny.

It must be admitted that the people who added the realistic sound to this print have exercised a certain amount of restraint. They have not inserted realistic sound in all the places they could have, only in some, so the comic world is destroyed only in patches, temporarily. The musical score, on the whole, is appropriate and, as musical accompaniment generally does, helps push the film in the direction of greater stylization, both when the music is the sole accompaniment and when it is joined by the realistic sound (which pushes the film in the opposite direction: toward realism). The film is still funny. It is simply less funny, funny less often, than it was. But this restraint hardly makes the additions that have been made less objectionable. And in one way this piecemeal destruction is even worse, in that it's more insidious. If the violation were total, many more people would be aware of it. This way they are likely to conclude that Keaton is less funny than he's cracked up to be—or than they remembered. (pp. 39-40)