The Navigator

Safety first! 

Buster Keaton on a boat - it doesn't get better than that. Criterion has a restored version of the 1924 "The Navigator" is crisp and lets viewers appreciate the freshness of this movie 100+ years on. I would have loved to be in the audience back in 1924 - how crazily entertaining it would have been! Keaton was so inventive. Did this movie have the first underwater scene? It must have been one of the earliest.

"The Navigator" starts with a convoluted setup for two scions of wealth and privilege, Rollo (Buster) and the woman who has just rejected his marriage proposal, Betsy (short queen Kathryn McGuire, a 5-foot-tall powerhouse), to end up stranded on a drifting, empty ocean liner. "Every family tree must have its sap," as the titles note. A lot of the comedy comes from their incompetence - the scene where they try to cook is hilarious. Just watching Betsy carefully add a couple of beans to a pot of seawater to make coffee is priceless.

Over time, they get better at taking care of themselves. For some activities like the coffee making, they come up with what I want to describe as Rube Goldberg-type devices - but although Goldberg was a contemporary of the film, his famous devices came about later on, so the movie's inventions predate the term. It's true of a few things in this movie - I also want to say some of the action is cartoony (there's a lovely near-miss chase scene, where the protagonists are chasing each other through the empty ship but keep ducking out of each other's sight coincidentally - a seminal version of a visual classic) but it also predates comic short animations. 

The "problematic relic of its time," as a Library of Congress blog puts it, is an attack on the boat by a group of island natives. Fascinatingly, the chief is played by Noble Johnson, who founded the first all-black movie studio (Lincoln Motion Picture Co.), which featured stories about middle-class black people and didn't reduce them to racist stereotypes. I feel sure this made an impression on Keaton. In the opening of "The Navigator," Rollo is inspired to propose to Betsy by seeing a very happy, prosperous black couple expressing their delight at being married. 

The technical tour de force is the underwater scene. Keaton really put himself through a lot for his work. The scenes were filmed partly in a pool and partly in frigid, but glass-clear, Lake Tahoe. The other scenes that must have taken some doing: the constant rocking of the boat during a storm, and an incredible barrel roll in a submarine that I would have to watch a couple of times to figure out how they managed to accomplish.

Buster Keaton movies are never dull! Put them on your watch list.