The Art Of Action: The First Action Hero

£3.50 / £5 includes tea/coffee and cake

Watch the films individually or all 3 as a day event. 1 ticket required for all 3 films. Drop-in, book on the door.

Special Event: The General (1926) with live musical accompaniment. Brought to you in partnership with Art Of Action.

Celebrating the original action hero join us for The General, Buster Keaton's most lavish production and his warmest, bringing together a boy, a girl and a train amid the maelstrom of the US Civil War.

Mixing wild hilarity with amazing stunts, The General stars silent comedy legend Buster Keaton as Johnny Gray. In the American civil war, a mix-up leads Johnny's sweetheart Annabelle to decide that he's a coward. But when the enemy steal his beloved train engine The General, and with it kidnap Annabelle, Johnny is determined to get them both back. What follows is a brilliant comedy full of daredevil antics that will have you laughing and gasping at the same time.

The Potteries Loop Line was a gold mine for the North Staffordshire Railway until the trams came – a train service linking all Six Towns running trains every 15 minutes during the day. The passenger line snaked through the Potteries, with mineral lines branching off to the coal mines and local industry.

You can still walk along most of the route today as there are pathways where the rails once ran. Introducing trams along these routes could be a goldmine today.

Here we enjoy various locations along the Line in the days of steam locomotives – seeing lots of loco action.There are comments from Hugh Brown, who filmed from trains going along the line and we have running commentaries from two former Lord Mayors – Arthur Chollerton and Tom Beddow - who were both train drivers and worked the Loop Linein the 1950s and 60s.

Sherlock Jr (1924) in partnership with Art Of Action.

Buster Keaton’s third feature is a breathtakingly virtuosic display of every silent comedy technique imaginable, from his own formidable physical skills to some then-ground breaking camera trickery. While there is endless debate as to which is the funniest of Buster Keaton’s 1920s features, there’s little doubt as to which is the cleverest. Anticipating Jean-Luc Godard and postmodernism by decades, the detective fantasy Sherlock Jr. largely takes place inside the head of a hapless and wronged cinema projectionist (Keaton) who – in a sequence that’s a technical marvel to this day – dreams himself into the screen only to be flummoxed by the film’s editing. But that’s merely one relatively early set-piece out of dozens, including a stunt so dangerous that it broke Keaton’s neck – something he wouldn’t discover until a routine medical examination over a decade later.

Part of the 'Art Of Action' project.

£3.50 / £5 includes tea/coffee and cake

Watch the films individually or all 3 as a day event. 1 ticket required for all 3 films. Drop-in, book on the door.