Artist The General

Actors like to boast about doing their own stunts, but Buster Keaton was something else altogether. His 1927 film The General finds him playing around with railroad ties, cattle-catchers, and boxcars with a sense of physicality that serves his character: a train engineer who tries to enlist in the Confederate Army but gets turned down because the powers-that-be think he’d be more useful as an engineer than as a soldier. His family and his girlfriend think he’s a coward, but Keaton gets a chance to redeem himself when his train is stolen by the North and he sets off to recover it.