Though Disney's film The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) is often compared to Buster Keaton's masterpiece The General (1926) due to the two pictures being based on the same historical incident, I think that's unfair. These two films could not be any more different in their approach: The General is an action-adventure/comedy/drama, while TGLC is a straightforward drama with action elements. Sure The General is the better of the two as far as great cinema goes, but the Disney picture should be assessed on its own merits and when you do so, you come to realize it is a minor gem.Performances are good all around and the action elements are well-choreographed and shot on-location on Georgia, where the real hijacking of The General took place. Though the chase is thrilling and the characters are all likable, there is a melancholy tint to the proceedings. The characters want to cut off the war once and for all. The chase itself is told in flashback, giving us knowledge of how wrong everything goes for the heroes beforehand. This somber undercurrent adds a lot to the movie.Worth watching.

Excellent film! I enjoyed every minute of this rather short, but greatly superb film on Great Locomotive Chase of 1862 near Chattanooga. The real story makes this film even more interesting, and the whole work is awesome. Excellent musical score, great scenery, decent performance of all actors, very thrilling trains, shoot-outs, North and South clashing, real drama, real feelings, very good details, very accurate depiction of moral and habits of people of those times.All of these makes this Old Style Hollywod film a very good watch. I do recommend this to all Civil War buffs!And even common film viewers will like this film and find it very brisk and very cool

As I have mentioned previously there are a limited number of commercial films about the American Civil War. Most people will instantly say GONE WITH THE WIND, but much of that film deals with the ante - bellum South before war begins, and an hour and a half deals with Georgia under Reconstruction into the late 1870s. There is the twin films GODS AND GENERALS about the rise and fall of the magnificent military partnership of Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, and GETTYSBURG. There is also THE HORSE SOLDIER about Grierson's Raid into Mississippi during the Vicksburg Campaign. There was the "Shiloh" segment of the HOW THE WEST WAS WON about the battle there. There was THE RAID about the attack of the Confederate Raiders from Canada on St. Albans, Vermont in the summer of 1864. Quantrell and his raiders appear in several films, most notably DARK COMMAND. There is also the prototype for GONE WITH THE WIND about the collapse of southern society called SO RED THE ROSE.It is notable that the emphasis is on raiders from the southern states or with southern sympathies (William Quantrell or Cantrell, or the St. Alban Raiders). But there are two films on one incident where the raiders were Northern raiders - the raid led by John J. Andrews in his celebrated February 1862 snatch of the locomotive "The General" in an attempt to damage southern railroad tracks and bridges in Georgia and Tennessee. The incident has ended up being the most discussed military operation of the land forces of the Civil War in film. First it was immortalized in what may have been the funniest war comedy ever made, Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL (1927). But Keaton, using the Andrews raid as a start, changed the story by having the Union raiders succeed for awhile in bringing the Confederate locomotive to Union lines and has his southern hero "Johnny Gray" steal it back. Unfortunately, Andrews and his raiders never had such luck. Indeed their fates were quite savage in reality.This 1956 film by Walt Disney is not as well known as Keaton's classic, but it come closer to being factually correct. It shows the planning of the scheme by Northern spy Andrews and his picked crew, how they stole the "General" in a surprise act when the train was getting refilled, and how they ran it for a twenty mile chase until the train reached the end of it's coal supply. Here the reality of the story gets more savage. Andrews and his men fled into the forests of Tennessee, and were tracked down by Southern troops who recaptured most of them. Andrews and several others were hung. The other captured raiders were sent to prison camps.For people who only think of Fess Parker as Walt Disney's "Davy Crockett" may be fascinated to see he played another role for that producer - and did a good job at it. And like the last episode of the series about the "King of the Wild Frontier", Parker's character died heroically, but violently again.

Westerns are generally concerned with shootouts btw desperadoes and law-abiding officers. It is no secret the westerns gave us the terms "the man in white" and the "man in black" to correspond to its basic colloquialism. But this is Disney making this movie, and so in such, we get a History lesson in the form of the Western. It's about the first men to win the congressional medal of honor. It is also about an army offensive that failed. Those Northern boys failed to get the better of the Johnny Rebs in this civil war tale. Fess Parker, he of the brimstone and iron voice, you know, that Gregory Peck way of manly speaking speaking that has totally disappeared from movies today and society in general - except maybe in the Midwest leads the Dirty dozenish crew who are to destroy the railway lines and communication system of the South so that the North can perform their beta version of D-Day. Pesky Jeffrey in a fine stone-walled performance picks up chase as they steal his train for this mission. In this movie, failure isn't really failure but success. The chase is the thing but not the thing and heroics are measured in a leader that his crew consider cowardly. Sharp writing and character is the star of this Disney opus. All in all, a fine western, a fine movie.