The General has all the sweet earnestness in the world. It is about trains, frontier America, flower-faced girls. The story is about a Confederate train driver (Buster Keaton) who gets his train and his girl back when they are stolen by Union soldiers.<br /><br />The film is slow-starting, then hilarious action comedy, often voted one of the best films ever made. Its sequences of sight gags, each topping the one before, is an incredible joy to behold. The film, however, was a box-office disaster on its original release. The story is based on an actual incident of the Civil War, treated more seriously in The Great Locomotive Chase.