The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 181

w. I 1 enjoy Silent Treatment Buster Keaton film has special showing at the Alex Theatre. helping perpetuate his name. I think he deserves it. I'd prefer younger generation heard of him and the older generation didn't forget.

5 I A A ELEANOR KEATON 500 members of the Oregon National Guard to play the armies. "Each had a blue uniform and a gray uniform, and they would charge back and forth." The National Guard came in handy when some sparks coining off the locomotive smokestack started a fire in the pine forest They made fairly quick work of putting it out, but there was so much smoke hovering overhead that filming had to cease until rain cleared the air. Also, in 1927, special effects meant actually blowing up a railroad trestle. Keaton and company built it, then dammed the small river running beneath so it would look as deep and wide as the Mississippi "In those days, there was no back-projection or anything," Eleanor Keaton said. And for Keaton, there were also no stuntmen.

For the film "Steamboat Bill for example, he had a wall of a house fall down around him while he was spared by passing through an open window. Such risk-taking was in his blood. Keaton grew up in the -medicine shows and vaudeville where his father would literally throw young Buster across the stage and against the scenery. He got so good at his craft that in New York, where the child labor laws were tough, Keaton's parents passed him off as a midget instead of a child. At 21, he left the show and went to work for Roscoe "Fatty" Ar-buckle, making short comic movies.

After a scandal ruined Ar-buckle's career, Keaton teamed up with producer Joseph Schenck and made his best movies: "Sherlock "The Navigator," "Steamboat Bill Jr." and, of course, "The General." In 1995, the year that would have been Buster Keaton's 100th birthday, Eleanor Keaton globetrotted from one film festival to another, from Berlin to Rio, from Michigan to Kansas, and at each one she saw "The General." "I know every frame," she said. But, she said, she'll happily watch it again. "I enjoy helping perpetuate his name. I think he deserves it," she said. "I'd prefer the younger generation heard of" him and the older generation didn't forget" BY ROBIN RAUZI TIMES STAFF WRITER When Buster Keaton made "The General" in 1927, it was a budget-buster.

The crew went on location, hired 500 extras, built a railroad trestle and a dam, then blew both up and sank a train into the river. The whole movie cost $250,000. By today's standards, that's petty cash. But at the time, remembers Keaton's widow, Eleanor Keaton, "They thought he was going to break the company." Only moderately successful at the time, "The General" grew in prestige year by year and now is considered by film scholars and movie lovers alike to be one of the greatest silent films ever made. On Saturday, the movie will get the treatment: screening at the 1920s-era Alex Theatre in Glen-dale, accompanied by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Timothy Brock will conduct the score, written by British composer Carl Davis about 10 years ago. Buster Keaton always considered "The General" to be "his baby," said Eleanor Keaton, because he found the book, "The Great Locomotive Chase," and brought it to the team of writers at his independent studio. The film is based on a true story of how Union spies stole a train "The General" from the Confederacy. Keaton, who also directed the movie, plays the train's Southern engineer, Johnny Gray. He is turned down by the Confederate Army when he tries to enlist because he is more valuable to the South as an engineer.

But his civilian status makes the lovely Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) believe he is a coward. When the only two things he loves in the world The General and Annabelle are stolen by the Union spies, he goes to heroic lengths to get them back. The film is subtly funny, not slapstick. Like Keaton's other great works, he develops the con- I Jirmous Physical, gag.here, the. j-j V- xM, I Ik fj- r-- ptf' -f mi -r- una-r-imr 1 TRAIN SCENE: A young Buster Keaton rides the front of a locomotive in his film "The BE THERE humor emerges as much from how him in 1940.

He was 44, twice husband's films, long it goes on as from what divorced. They were married until Exteriors for "The General" actually happens. 1966, when he died of cancer. Now were filmed on location in Oregon, Eleanor Keaton, who has a near- a spry 79, Eleanor Keaton lives in a she said, where in black-and- encyclopedic memory of Keaton's condominium in Toluca Lake deco- white, the pine-doited landscape 1 fitrni -was 2iiwheri i rated rbstefs! from her latei could pass for Georgia. They hired The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra's Silent Film Gala, featuring Buster Keaton's "The General," at the Alex Theatre, 216 N.

Brand Glendale. $254200. (213) 622-7001, Ext. 275. iruto.