STRAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 100, 19 July 1927, Page 15

STRAND

MONSTER PROGRAMME The Strand Theatre is drawing large audiences nightly to witness the fine picture programme, which marks the return of this theatre to a picture programme after the successful Humphrey Bishop season. Perhaps of first interest to Aucklanders is the remarkable film, exclusive to the Strand, of the New Zealand cricket team in action. Excellent pictures of our boys practising at Lords are given, as well as the matches with Martineau’s XI. and Middlesex. Sportsmen and all aspiring cricketers find this picture a great attraction. To all who love a good laugh, and really clever comedy, ’‘The General,” Buster Keaton’s biggest and costliest picture, fills the bill. “The General" is unique in filmdom, in that it picturises a true story of the sixties, is historically accurate, contains thrills never duplicatedv in the biggest dramatic photoplays, and at the same time is comedy from the opening fade-in to the final fade-out.

When Buster started work on “The General” as his first picture for United Artists, he did so with the idea of making the year’s biggest comedy. When critical Hollywood audiences previewed the completed opus they pronounced it not only the greatest comedy they had ever seen, but a feature that ranks in dramatic action with some of the outstanding photoplays of the past decade. Nearly a year elapsed from the time Buster and his staff began research work on “The General” until the comedy was completed. Several months were spent on location in Oregon, where Civil War towns were built, a railroad leased, three locomotives and scores of cars purchased and converted into wood-burners and equipment of the sixties, and thousands of National Guardsmen and former soldiers recruited for the battle scenes.

One of the big thrills in “The General,” which is based on the Andrewes’s railroad raid and locomotive chase, a vivid chapter of the Civil War, is the plunge of a speeding locomotive from a burning trestle into a raging river. This scene was made at a cost of 40,000 dollars; the wreckage still reposes in the bed of the river near Cottage Grove, Oregon.