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There were many virtues to the best filmmaking of the silent era, but one achievement remains unchallenged, even at the other end of the century - the chase sequence. The Great Chase is all about the finest chases of the silent era, as handled by D.W. Griffith, Fred Niblo with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Buster Keaton in classics such as Way Down East, The Mark Of Zorro and The General, and features Fairbanks, Keaton, Pearl White, Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess, in some of the most exciting and memorable scenes of their careers. From the moment the bandits began their getaway in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903, with the posse gathering and riding off in pursuit, filmmakers knew that they were on to something. By the next decade, they'd mastered the technique, and in the 1920's they perfected it to the point where Buster Keaton was building virtually an entire movie, The General, around a multi-part extended pursuit between two trains. The essentials of that movie, along with Lillian Gish's flight across the ice floes in Way Down East and Douglas Fairbanks' pursuit of evil in his first swashbuckler, The Mark Of Zorro make up the most famous parts of this exciting compilation film.
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