The hero of The General is a little engine driver, turned down by the Confederate recruiting sergeants, dismissed as a coward by his girl, who, in pursuit of his stolen engine, penetrates the Unionist lines, spies on a military conference, rescues the girl, recovers the engine and steams back in triumph to the Confederate encampment. The exploits are preposterously heroic; their manner of execution is brisk but detached. Confronted with the outlandish or the alarming—the disappearance of his train, the discovery that in setting fire to the railway bridge he has placed himself on the wrong side of the blaze, or that, in his grand scheme to fire on the enemy train, he has directed the cannonball straight into the cab of his own engine—Keaton remains imperturbable. This, one feels, is how he expects things to behave; there is no need for undue alarm. It is out of this laconic, matter-of-fact acceptance, this obstinate persistence in effort, however misguided, this untroubled, dream-like logic, that Keaton builds his comedy technique. The film advances in a series of triumphs and setbacks, with each check stimulating him to fresh activity, fresh displays of ingenuity. The train puffs past first the retreating Confederate troops, then the advancing Yankees, while its driver, sublimely unaware, busily saws wood for the engine. It runs steadily towards an obstacle across the line while Keaton, spread-eagled against the front of the engine, comes as close to trepidation as we ever see him before he casually bounces the log out of the way with a neat jab from one he is already clasping. (p. 198)

With these simple resources—a railway line, a train to chase and one to be chased—the comedy follows a classically direct course, with scarcely a gag or a situation inserted for its own sake. It is only when the film leaves the trains behind, in the final battle scenes, the fooling with the sword that flies from its scabbard for the last time to impale an enemy sniper, that the effects seem rather too deliberately contrived, the situations a little too real to be altogether funny. In part this may be because the film, directed by Keaton in collaboration with Clyde Bruckman, conveys, unobtrusively, so exact and stylish a sense of its period. The comedian has strayed on to a real battlefield and, momentarily, the illusion cracks.

Human relationships, defying logic, breaking his solitary concentration of purpose, form the smallest part of any Keaton film. Here, his attitude towards the girl … characteristically combines protective affection with exasperation. When she arranges her well-intentioned booby-trap in the path of the enemy train or, under fire from their pursuers, snatches up a broom and begins sweeping out the engine cab, he finds her endearingly ridiculous. But for Keaton the real world is elsewhere.

Innocently and without bravado, Keaton has the measure of his surroundings. He does not, like Harold Lloyd, want to be admired or successful; he is not, like Harry Langdon, a child at large in a puzzling universe; he has not, like Chaplin, assumed the dreams and the sorrows of the world. But his enduring, unsentimental self-sufficiency has its own intimations of melancholy, in the contrast between his determination and his resources as he marches off down the line in pursuit of his runaway train and, always, in the sad, thoughtful eyes set in the pale poker face. Keaton is the most exact, the most mathematically precise, of comedians, yet as one laughs one wonders: the quintessential Buster Keaton seems always to retreat a little, behind the enigmatic, impassive mask of the comedian. (pp. 198-99)