Buster Keaton

THE NAVIGATOR

Buster Keaton Productions, 1924. Directed by Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton.  Camera:  Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley.  With Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire.

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Buster Keaton revisits his familiar persona of a spoiled society dandy thrown into the surreal world. Young millionaire Rollo Treadway (the sap in the family tree, according to a title card) embarks on a long voyage to nurse his broken heart when his lady love, Kathryn McGuire, turns down his proposal of marriage.

Of course he winds up on the wrong dock and boards a derelict ship, which (as luck would have it) McGuire has also boarded.  Foreign spies set the ship adrift on the high seas, stranding the pampered heirs, who must now fend for themselves. 

Keaton indulges in his love of Rube Goldberg contraptions with an elaborate jungle of levers and hatches that turns a giant galley into a veritable automat and dives into 20th-century technology when he dons a diving suit for a hilarious underwater sequence.

McGuire makes a marvelous comic partner for Keaton, a gifted physical comedian and a spunky love interest, while the ship plays straight man to their pratfalls and gags, practically coming alive like a haunted house in their first terrified night aboard.

The match between man and massive machine proved so successful that Keaton returned to the concept for his two greatest comedies, The General and Steamboat Bill Jr.

Internet Movie Database