Critics, who see so many movies and love a lot of them, usually learn to come up with a pat answer. (Mine is "Casablanca.")

Bob Mondello, the film critic for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," likes to surprise people with his answer, because for "a general all-around all-purpose favorite film, nobody expects you to say a silent comedy."

Mondello's choice is "The General," Buster Keaton's 1927 silent comedy about a man, a woman and a train. Mondello will talk about his love of "The General," of Keaton's body of work and of silent movies and old-fashioned theater organs, on a special live broadcast of KUER's "Radio West" Saturday at 7 p.m. the Capitol Theatre, 50 W. 200 South, Salt Lake City.

The show, with host Doug Fabrizio, will air live on KUER, 90.1 FM. After the show, the Capitol Theatre audience will be treated to a screening of "The General," with the Organ Loft's Blaine Gale accompanying on the Capitol's theater organ. Admission is a mere 25-cent donation, and attendees are encouraged to dress in '20s period costume.

In "The General," Keaton plays a young Southerner who tries to enlist in the Confederate Army, but is turned down because the South needs his services as an train engineer. This fails to impress his girl, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), who thinks Johnny's a coward. But when Union spies seize Johnny's train, The General, with Annabelle Lee on board, Johnny must spring to action to save both his loves.

" 'The General' seems to me one of the most gorgeous epics ever made," Mondello said this week in a phone interview. "The whole notion of an epic journey, of an epic character, of a world changing right before your eyes, right as the movie is happening. That is all in that picture. And yet it's very funny. It's a portrait of a society in transition. It's an amazingly funny portrait of a romance. And it's this incredible journey."

Mondello said that unlike Charlie Chaplin, his great rival in the silent era, Keaton didn't have a connection with his audiences.

"Keaton doesn't have a relationship with the audience - he had a relationship with the universe," Mondello said. Take, for example, the classic scene in "Steamboat Bill" when the front of a house falls on Keaton, who remains unscathed because he stands where the open third-floor window lands.

"He and the universe have this pact, and the universe doesn't hurt him. It torments him, it does all kinds of other terrible things to him," Mondello said. "But he has this relationship with the universe which is marvelous. It's what we think we have when we're little kids, that somehow, miraculously, you're always safe."

Keaton's audience grew to accept the stone-faced comic. "I love the story that the producers made him smile, made him do an alternate take for the end of a picture, and it was booed off the screen," Mondello said. "The audience didn't want him to be different."

Mondello traces his love for silent film back to the 1970s, when he was a publicist for a small theater chain in the Washingon, D.C., area - and one of the theaters had a silent-film festival, with a live accompanist.

"It was magical - it was the most wonderful thing," Mondello said. "I got so into it, I went every night during the festival. It was a month long, I saw all the films two or three times. I just came away with this love of silent clowns."

He's also a fan of old movie palaces, places like the Capitol that used to make moviegoing into an event. "I get such a charge out of those old theaters," he said. "There's something different about the way that sound bounces around them. And the feeling of seeing something in a house with all that wood, and it's all ornate and it's just gorgeous."

Mondello said of Utah that "you cannot imagine how lucky you are" to be home to three working theater organs: the Capitol, the Organ Loft in South Salt Lake and the recently restored organ at Peery's Egyptian Theatre in Ogden.

Mondello has reviewed films for NPR since 1984 and frequently gives presentations for film clubs and for NPR member stations. (Saturday will mark his third visit to Salt Lake City, he said.) He said talks like these allow for the back-and-forth conversations he doesn't get from reviewing films.

"When I was a kid, and I was just starting to be interested in criticism, I really thought it would be kind of a dialogue," he said. "I would say something about the actor, and the actor would get mad at me, and someone would write in to defend the actor, and there would be this thing going back and forth, which I thought was a great idea. Of course that never happened. And the larger the institution, the less likely people are to write in. So it's really nice to meet the public."

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Got a question about the movies? Send it to movie critic Sean P. Means: The Salt Lake Tribune, 90 S. 400 West, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, UT 84101, or e-mail at movies@sltrib.com.