The Most Expensive Shot in Silent Film History
On July 23, 1926, silent film star Buster Keaton crashed a full-sized locomotive into an Oregon river, setting the record for the most expensive shot in silent film history.
The incredible stunt was filmed for The General, one of Keaton’s most memorable comedies. The stunt reportedly cost $42,000, approximately $750,000 in today’s money.
The General is loosely based on a real Civil War incident known as the Great Locomotive Chase and it involves Keaton’s character Johnnie Gray, a Southern railroad engineer, chasing his beloved, stolen train called The General across enemy lines using whatever vehicles he can find, leading to a long, brilliantly choreographed chase filled with physical comedy and large-scale stunts.
Keaton, who co-directed the movie, was given a $400,000 budget and arrived at the filming location in Cottage Grove, Oregon, pulling 18 freight cars full of “Civil War-era cannons, rebuilt passenger cars, stagecoaches, houses, wagons and laborers,” according to Wikipedia.
The collapsing bridge scene is the climax of the movie. Keaton employed six cameras for the scene; curiously only one angle was shown in the final edit. Cottage Grove declared a local holiday so the town could watch the spectacle. A reported 4,000 residents turned up. Coupled with the 500 extras dressed in Union and Confederate uniforms, filming would have been a hullabaloo.
There would have been a lot of standing around as filming began four hours late owing to plenty of last-minute tests. According to Marion Meade’s book, Buster Keaton: Cut To The Chase (1995), the crew left the wreckage in the riverbed. The locomotive would become a tourist attraction until 20 years later, when it was salvaged in 1944 to help with the war effort.
Buster Keaton was an entertainer known for his daring stunts carried out with a deadpan expression. While he wasn’t in danger for the locomotive-bridge scene, he performed many dangerous physical stunts during production of The General, including jumping between moving trains and running on top of them.
The General went over budget by a considerable margin — almost double. And despite critics’ displeasure at it, it is considered a classic of the silent era, praised for its photography and choreography.
While crashing a train into a river seems insane now. Keaton came from an era when showmen would purposely crash trains into each other for entertainment.
