Buster Keaton was 21 years old when he first went into films. He’d been a vaudeville star since the age of three, in a family act which involved his father grabbing him by the seat of his pants and throwing him across the stage, into scenery, the orchestra pit, the audience (“Buster” was not his given name). In 1917, he went to work under Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, appearing in 14 two-reel comedies before making 19 shorts of his own—writing, directing, starring, and performing some of the most dangerous, acrobatic stunts ever put on screen (in Cops, for instance, he escapes a police chase by grabbing onto a passing car with one hand, flying out of frame). Over the next six years, Keaton would make 12 features, working at about three times the clip of Chaplin. Of these films, he would later say, The Navigator (1924) and The General (1926) were his favorites.
The Navigator is the first feature in which Keaton made use of a large prop as a moving, mechanical setting. Such a scenario drastically alters the world of the film, the scope and expressivity of its visual language. In The Navigator, the titular ship dictates the rhythm and pacing of its gags, the composition of its shots, the dramatic structure of the film itself. The film is less about its surface-level melodrama than the comedy at its heart: that a man, woman, and machine can live together in blissful, domestic harmony. This, Keaton thought, would be his most impressive film to date, the one that would catapult him into the same stratosphere as Chaplin and Harold Lloyd—an action comedy as daring and exciting as it was funny.
The Navigator tells the story of Rollo Treadway, a young bachelor living in San Francisco. He’s the son of a millionaire and has grown up with a servant for every task. Unlike Chaplin, whose Tramp offered continuity of character across films, Keaton liked to adapt each hero to the scenario. For The Navigator, he revived the rich layabout he’d played in his first starring role, The Saphead (1920); in an oblique callback, a title card introduces him as “living proof that every family tree must have its sap.” In Keaton’s films, his character’s socioeconomic and family status varies, as does his wardrobe (here he swaps his trademark pork-pie for a top hat). What remains the same is his fervent desire for a conventional American manhood. In The Navigator, he employs a castaway narrative, which forces the stakes of the main conflict and love plot together: saving themselves and winning the girl become one and the same.
The inspiration for the film began with the prop. One of Keaton’s technical advisors, on loan to MGM, was scouting ships for an adventure film when he saw it: a 500-foot ocean liner about to be junked that could be had for $25,000. Rent it, said Keaton, and he, Jean Havez, Clyde Bruckman, and Joseph Mitchell, co-writers on his last three films, set to work. Keaton’s first two features had done well at the box office. But his previous film, Sherlock Jr. (1924), had been less of a hit than Keaton was hoping for. He wanted the next to make a big splash.
From the beginning of his career, Keaton had been using large props as the settings and motivating forces for his films. (When asked later what profession he might have gone into if he’d received the proper education, he responded: “civil engineer.”) At the end of his first day on Arbuckle’s set he took a camera home, where he reportedly took it apart and put it back together by morning. His first two-reel, One Week (1920), finds two newlyweds trying to assemble a house from a mail-order kit. His shorts also occasionally featured boats as props. In The Balloonatic (1923) he walks through a river in a canoe with a hole through the bottom, and in The Boat (1921) he builds a boat inside his house, then finds that he can’t get it out. There was something about the open sea that seemed ripe for a feature-length comedy.
In Keaton’s view, a good comedy should maintain a hierarchy between plot and what he called “the idea,” the characters and scenario through which the comic substance of the film would emerge. For Keaton, causality arose out of successive gags rather than dramatic structure. On stage, he’d done burlesques and imitations of performers with whom he shared a bill; later he relied on parody of popular epics and melodramas. His first feature, Three Ages (1923), was a spoof of Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).
In his films, Keaton said, the idea was more important than the plot. “Often the plot was based on a melodramatic situation as in The Navigator, where one nation’s agents set adrift a steamship just bought by its enemy,” he said, as recounted in Oliver Lindsey Scott’s Buster Keaton: The Little Iron Man. On set, Keaton, his co-writers, and gagmen would sit around and discuss gags and put in plot where it was needed.
We can also, when we build up and develop our story, put in a serious or pathetic moment or two. These, of course, are no more than the light and shade which make for the best comedy, whether on the stage or on the screen.
The idea for The Navigator was Havez’s: “A rich boy and a rich girl who never had to lift a finger, always someone to wait on ‘em — houses full of butlers, maids, valets, chauffeurs. Put those two beautiful, spoiled brats — the two most helpless people in the world — adrift on a ship, all alone.” Keaton loved it. All they had to work out was how to set the thing afloat.
The film opens in a well-furnished room overlooking a harbor filled with bearded, gesticulating men—agents of one of two unnamed, rival nations. “Gentlemen, the enemy have just purchased the steamship Navigator…There she lies now, and it is our patriotic duty to destroy that ship…” the leader noiselessly proclaims, amidst a sequence of intertitles. Next we cut to the proud man who has just sold the ship, John O’Brien, and his daughter, Betsy, then to our hero. A long shot of his bedroom: a cavernous space, complete with floor length drapes, chaise lounge, intricately framed paintings, and the enormous bed on which Rollo sits, dabbing his mouth with a napkin before placing it back onto the breakfast cart, which his butler, who has been standing by, obligingly wheels from the room.
Much of the comedy in The Navigator derives from what Keaton called “natural gags,” which emerge organically from character and situation. The film’s setup relies entirely on Rollo’s privilege and sense of entitlement. After finishing his coffee, Rollo toddles over to the window, where he observes a couple on the street below, being chauffeured in a car which reads “JUST MARRIED.” He turns to a framed photo of Betsy atop his wardrobe, then to his butler, who has materialized at his side, and remarks “I think I’ll get married.” The butler bows and says something indistinguishable. After a pause, Rollo turns towards the camera and adds “Today.” He then instructs: “We’ll sail for Honolulu tomorrow on our honeymoon — get two tickets.”
His love interest, Betsy, is played by Kathryn McGuire, The Girl in Sherlock Jr., who signed on again for The Navigator and was rewarded with a bigger, more compelling role with an actual name attached. A ballet dancer as well as an actress, McGuire was a talented physical comedian and the perfect match for Keaton’s aristocratic misfit, selling her own ineptitude with a stuffy, blissful ignorance. Of all Keaton’s silents, The Navigator is the film in which its leading lady is given the most screen time. At the outset, it seems Buster’s standard love plot will be in play: that of a wimpy, naive young man attempting to win the hand of a woman who’s completely out of reach. But once on board, McGuire and Keaton function together as a hapless, bumbling duo, and slowly but steadily he wins her over.
After a bath and a quick sight gag (Rollo wades into his walk-in bath in a daze with his robe still on), the screen reads: “He had completed all arrangements — except to notify the girl.” What follows, Keaton claimed, was one of the most stolen gags ever performed on screen. Rollo walks out of the grand house, cane in one hand, flowers in the other. He gets into the waiting car, chauffeur at the wheel (a footman wraps a blanket around his knees and closes the door behind him). The car then drives across the street to the girl’s house. Rollo goes in and asks her to marry him; she says “Certainly not!” He walks back to the car, informs his chauffeur “I think a long walk would do me good,” and walks back across the street, the car following with a U-turn, and back inside the house. He returns to his room where his butler hands him the tickets, with congratulations and notice that the boat sails at ten the next morning. Rollo wearily responds: “I don’t get up that early — so I’ll go aboard tonight.” He tears up one ticket and puts the other in his pocket.
Rollo instructs his chauffeur to go to pier 2; the girl and her father, who wants to collect some papers from the Navigator, head for pier 12. They both end up at pier 12 (the night guard has opened the gate so that it covers the “1” on the sign). Rollo goes aboard, but only after standing outside long enough to lose both ticket and hat to the wind (a recurring gag: he loses a half dozen hats over the course of the film). The agents plotting to set the boat adrift seize the night watchman, who tells them there is no one aboard. The O’Briens arrive and Betsy stays in the car as her father heads to the ship. Suddenly, agents swarm; he yells “Help!” as he’s carried off. Betsy runs aboard to look for him, but a moment later the agents untie the ship and the gangway slips into the sea. She and Rollo (who has gone to bed) are adrift. He sleeps soundly. She collapses, despairingly, into a fade out.
The morning finds Rollo and Betsy wandering the deserted ship. Neither is aware the other is aboard. She explores one deck, he promenades down the other. He seats himself at a table in the dining room and claps for service. At this point, Keaton said, “It’s gradually dawning on the old Slow Thinker that he’s on a deserted ship. Meanwhile the girl is in a panic, looking all over to find someone alive on board.” They wander about, the pacing perfectly timed so that each stays out of sight of the other. He descends the stairs from the top deck just as she moves from the middle to the bottom. He looks out over the lower deck as she disappears into an alcove.
Keaton famously said “Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” For him, it’s the angle and the framing that make or break a gag. In this sequence, he sets the camera on the bow of the ship so it takes in all three decks. He and McGuire, synchronized perfectly so that each of them is continuously ascending or descending from one deck to another at the exact same moment, always miss each other. This shot reveals, as James Agee called it in “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” “the whole intricate superstructure of the ship.” It’s the first time the viewer can drink in the ship’s enormity in a single shot. It also establishes the comic root of the scenes on board: most of these jokes are jokes of scale.
After several minutes of frenzy, Keaton brings the two together. Betsy, now on the lower deck, sits down on the left side of a plank someone has left across two sawhorses. Rollo pauses on the upper deck in front of a large ship’s ventilator. Suddenly, the suction whips his top hat back; he reaches for it, toppling off balance and down the vent. The hat lands squarely on the plank at Betsy’s side; a half second later Rollo, butt first, breaks through the plank and sends them both sprawling. They sit up, each gasping at the other. Buster blubbers, then leans forward, as an intertitle asks: “Will you marry me?” She shakes her head and mouths “No.”
As Keaton said, by this point in the film, “you know they’d been raised with a silver spoon in their mouths.” He can’t scratch his back without a valet, “she never saw a kitchen in her life, doesn’t know how to boil a cup of tea.” Now that they know they’ll have to fend for themselves, they head to the kitchen to see what’s what. Everything there is too big: the supplies, the serving sizes, the appliances. Rollo boils eggs in an enormous cauldron; they sit down to the table with knives the size of machetes and large two-pronged forks, which neither is able to eat with. Her coffee tastes terrible.
Adrift at sea, at first shy of each other, then irritated, their relationship slowly grows in fondness. The isolation of the ship and their shared unfamiliarity with sailing allows them to learn and mature alongside each other. There are, however, growing pains: his rowboat sinks and he almost drowns, she goes over the side and nearly does the same. After lights out, the wall bunk above Rollo collapses on top of him. Later, they find two boxes, one marked firecrackers, the other, candles (guess which one they light). As it turns out, even the candles are dangerous. Another, adjacent box was covering the word “ROMAN.”
To make matters worse, the ship seems to have a mind of its own. A victrola plays a creepy sea chanty, doors open and close with the ship’s tilt, deck chairs slide back and forth, scaring them to their wit’s end. Keaton understood that inanimate objects as well as environments can take on their own personalities and sense of will. A co-writer once described the magic he worked with props: “He makes the thing alive.” In Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), a cyclone toys with Keaton, electrocuting him, tossing him into somersaults, almost crushing him with a house facade (saved by the window). Here the ship and sea work in tandem as living antagonists, battering and berating the castaways. But after a few weeks of drifting they’ve slowly become equal to the vessel, rigging a series of complex machines to do the work for them. Systems of strings, pulleys, and chutes now light the stove, dispense coffee beans, and fill pots. This sequence serves to parody the turn Keaton often saw in contemporary melodrama, where the hero suddenly overcomes some great predicament. Instead of sensationalizing, Keaton heightens, and in doing so his characters undergo real transformation.
This is a device Keaton often used: after making a complete fool of himself throughout the film’s first half, his character finally masters the tools or implements which had previously so baffled him. In College (1927), trying to impress a girl and win her back from his jock arch-rival, he tries out for every track and field event, knocking down hurdles, throwing the javelin a miserable three feet forwards, tossing the discus backwards into the college dean. By the film’s final sequence he has acquired the athleticism needed to win the girl, pole vaulting into her room, where the jock has taken her hostage, and fighting him off by discus and javelin-throwing household objects at him until he retreats out the window. Unlike Chaplin, whose Tramp was always an outsider, Keaton’s characters all maintain a certain desire for conventional success and conventionally consummated narratives. Nearly all his features end in either an offscreen or implied marriage.
After a few weeks Rollo and Betsy spy “Land!”, but after a closer look through binoculars realize it’s inhabited by “Cannibals!” A moment later, the ship runs aground and an enormous leak forms. The camera hovers over a medium-long shot of them sitting, dejectedly, on a bench with a large diver’s suit between them. “It was when we approached the final third of the picture,” Keaton said in his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, “that we had the characters in serious trouble which permitted bigger laughs, the biggest of all coming when catastrophe threatens.” We wait with bated breath as the girl looks around, begins to examine the suit. Buster takes notice, and the split second when he realizes what’s about to happen and looks towards the camera, horror frozen on his face, is both painful and hilarious.
Keaton was often called “the great stone face.” This deadpan, he said, went all the way back to his vaudeville days, when he realized he got more laughs if his face only faintly registered the damage his body was taking. “If I laughed at what I did, the audience didn’t,” he later said. “So, by the time I went into pictures, not smiling was mechanical with me.” The nickname, though, is misleading. It wasn’t that he didn’t react; he didn’t overreact. Keaton understood that the best film acting was in the eyes and body language. A moment of recognition is not just a look. Unlike most silent actors, who still played to the balcony, Keaton relied on subtlety and understatement. The reaction fits the character. When Rollo realizes he must don the diver’s suit, his eyes glaze over. He says nothing. He looks at the girl, then the diver’s helmet, the girl again, then begins to fidget and avoid eye contact, shrinking against the wall. We read his terror as clearly as if it’s been verbalized.
The Navigator’s underwater sequence is one of the most famous of its kind. Keaton, now in the diver’s suit, goes down to patch a hole in the ship. The sequence was shot during winter in Lake Tahoe, using cameras placed in a wooden box with a glass plate, which was continually iced to avoid fogging. The suit only allowed Keaton to remain underwater for thirty minutes at a time, after which he and his cameramen reportedly had to be revived each time with large quantities of bourbon. Even before he makes it under water, there’s a gag where Keaton, ready except for the helmet, sits smoking a cigarette. In an early take, McGuire places his helmet on and twists, locking it. She was only supposed to give it a short twist. Keaton went into a frenzy of coughing, but everyone assumed it was part of the gag. Only one crew member realized in time and stepped in before he was suffocated.
Keaton and his crew toiled for four weeks to nail the whole sequence. His most famous rule? Never fake a gag. It was only believable if he actually did it. Underwater, his trademark physical comedy undergoes a significant change: the shape of each gag is lengthened and flattened out, its beats spread further apart, its pacing slowed. We open at the base of the ship’s enormous rudder. Rollo drags out a sign that says “DANGER: MEN AT WORK.” He gets at it, but is soon assaulted by a succession of marine creatures. But he is nothing if not resourceful. He uses a lobster as pliers, cutting a wire with its claws. He catches a swordfish, and when another appears, employs the first in a duel. This sequence is intercut with cannibals swarming the beach and taking to their canoes: as Rollo duels with the swordfish, his damsel is now in distress.
Most comedies during this period ended with a final chase. Keaton had just done so in Sherlock Jr. “The chase is just one form of climax,” he often said to co-writer Clyde Bruckman. “It works so well because it speeds up the tempo, generally involves the whole cast, and puts the whole outcome of the story on the block.” In The Navigator, he makes the chase a back and forth. The cannibals board and capture Betsy. She calls out, and Rollo pauses underwater, hearing something far off. The cannibals load her into a canoe and return to shore. Rollo then realizes they have severed his air line and rope. There’s only one way: take a walk to the beach. En route he tangles with an octopus, which wraps a tentacle around his neck and releases its ink. Meanwhile, the girl is surrounded. We cut to calm ocean water—suddenly, about 20 yards out, Rollo, the savior in a diver’s suit, walks out of the sea. He waves his arms and the cannibals scatter. She runs over and rains kisses on the glass of his helmet. They wade out with a stray paddle and she straddles him, a hilariously sexualized makeshift boat, and rows back to the ship.
The Navigator became Keaton’s biggest money maker and remains one of his most thrilling, imaginative films. It is a symphony of rich, complex harmonics: light and dark not merely accentuating each other, but becoming part of the other’s essential substance. The film’s back and forth finale swings from imminent rescue to capture and back again. The cannibals board the ship and Rollo and Betsy escape in a life raft. They begin to sink but suddenly reverse direction as a navy submarine surfaces under them.
Buster Keaton’s genius lies in the universality of his character. He takes us inside the everyman and makes us know him as we know ourselves. He immerses us in the exhilarating sensation of performing physical miracles we cannot perform. He displays both an immense physical control and an ability to make falling on your ass seem like a highly trained, balletic feat. But in life as on screen, death and injury are only ever momentarily thwarted; Keaton hurt himself badly and often. Still, in his miraculous movement and determination, he held grace and danger in remarkable balance. “There can be such a thing as too many laughs, that they can follow too close together for all of them to register,” Keaton said. “But how long a moment of pathos in a comedy may be allowed to run is like the timing of a gag. We can argue the question, work over it and experiment in the studio, but it is the audience that gives us the answer.” What moves us most about Keaton is that his pathos and comedy are one and the same.