[When Fleming's Gone With the Wind was re-released in 1967, the distributors tried to "modernize" the film.]

An analogous thing has been done recently to Buster Keaton's silent comedy feature, The General…. And here the changes are even more serious, not least because The General, unlike Gone With the Wind, is a masterpiece by one of the great film-makers (perhaps the greatest film-maker of the silent era).

The distributors have made basically two kinds of change: one, the less serious, in the visuals; the other, far more serious, because fundamental, in the sound track. Both seem to have been carried out, at least in part, in the futile and misguided attempt to "modernize" the film, to make it seem less like a silent and a product of its period.

Let us deal first with the less serious change: the changing of the intertitles to subtitles superimposed over the images...