Our Hospitality

I've got more silent movies that I need to get off of my DVR, so next up on that list is the early Buster Keaton feature Our Hospitality.

We don't see Buster for several minutes. Instead, the movie starts with a prologue, set in Kentucky in 1810, telling us about the feud between the "Canfields" and the "McKays", an obvious reference to the Hatfields and McCoys. The families have been feuding so long that they don't know any more why the feud started. In any case, the feud is about to reach a climax with John McKay and James Canfield getting into a shootout that leaves both of them dead. McKay left behind a young wife and infant son, while James had a brother who had three children. Mrs. McKay is so sick of the whole feud that she decides to take her kid and go back to her sister in New York, which as we see is surprisingly undeveloped for 1810.

Two decades pass, and Willie grows up (played as an adult by Buster Keaton) not having learned much about the feud because his now-decesed mother didn't want to tell him about it. Why bother your kid with stuff that's long-ago history? Adult Willie gets a letter which is from a lawyer telling him that the family left some property in Kentucky that's now his, and he's going to have to come to Kentucky to claim it. So he gets on the very new-fangled technology of the steam train to head off to Kentucky. (The first steam trains did start running right around this time, but there wasn't enough track to get the characters from New York to Kentucky.) This is the chance for Buster to use some of his train-based comedy which he seemed to like and would reach a peak in The General, as well as introducing us to the female lead, Virginia (Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton's real life wife).

The two meet and fall in love along the train journey, although it turns out that Virginia is in fact Virginia Canfield, the third sibling in the family in the prologue of the movie. Their father Joseph, who was not the one killed, had wanted the feud to end, and would before Willie's arrival probably have considered the feud as long-ago history as Willie's mom did. But Joseph's two sons are out for blood, and immediately look for ways to bump off Willie and get Willie's inheritance. Not that it's a particularly big inheritance, as Willie finds out to his surprise.

He's invited to the Canfield place for dinner, having met Virginia, and the brothers figure out this would be a good time to kill Willie. Dad, for his part, doesn't think this is morally right, as being a guest at the Canfield place requires the Canfields to show "our hospitality". So it's the next day after Willie leaves that the two sons can go after Willie in a climax that involves a literal cliff-hanger, trains and a river flowing over a waterfall.

To me Our Hospitality isn't quite as good as later silents, but to be fair to Buster Keaton he was learning and movie technology was consistently improving. Keaton had only made one feature before this, and that one, Three Ages was structured so it could be re-edited into two-reelers if it had been necessary. In any case, although Our Hospitality is a bit slow at times and some of the train gags don't quite work, it's still Buster Keaton and he's always worth watching.

Sidewalks of New York

About twenty years ago, TCM produced a relatively brief documentary titled So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, which discusses how Keaton's signing a contract with MGM at the end of the silent era more or less derailed his career as MGM terribly stifled Keaton's creativity. If you want to see a sad example of what MGM did to Keaton, try watching Sidewalks of New York.

Keaton plays Homer Van Dine Harmon, and as you might guess from a name like that, he's an idle rich guy. Specifically, one who owns several tenement apartment buildings. So, as the movie opens his assistant Poggle (Cliff Edwards) is down at the tenements to collect the rent, only to get beat up for his trouble by the sort of young hoodlums who a decade later would be played by the Dead End Kids, or maybe the East Side Kids or the Bowery Boys. Homer is going to have to collect the rent himself.

However, Homer's attempt also leads to the same sort of scuffle that Poggle got into previously. It also results in Homer's meeting Margie (Anita Page), who is the adult sister of Clipper, one of the delinquent boys. She's also his guardian, since 100 years ago it wasn't all that uncommon for there to be large age differences between siblings and the parents to die relatively young. In a trope that MGM probably liked but doesn't work for this version of Buster Keaton, Homer immediately falls head over heels for Margie, so Homer wants to do something for Clipper and the rest of the neighborhood boys.

Homer's plan is to take one of the buildings he owns and convert the ground floor into a YMCA-like gymnasium, where the local boys can blow off their steam and possibly get fit in the process too. But Clipper doesn't like Homer from the previous incident of trying to collect rent, and vows not to go to the gym at all, and convince he friends not to go either. Clipper prefers the company of Butch, who is much more of Clipper's social class. The only problem is that Butch is an actual criminal. Worse, Butch decides to bring Clipper into his schemes.

The final scheme is a plot to kill Homer. Homer, as part of his trying to do good deeds for the deprived neighborhood boys, is going to put on a play with the kids playing most of the parts. The plot of the play will have Clipper's character shoot one played by Homer with a prop gun and blanks. When Butch learns about this, he plots to have real bullets put in the gun so it will kill Homer!

Sidewalks of New York is, I'm sorry to say, fairly dire. That I think, is largely down to MGM, as well as to the fact that the movie was released in 1931, well into the sound era. MGM, instead of letting Buster come up with his trademark physical humor, wants a bunch of dialogue-based stuff, which doesn't work at all, as in a terrible courtroom scene. The movie also feels like a bunch of disjointed scenes. It's a shame that Buster Keaton wound up in stuff like this.

Beach Blanket Bingo

With the days getting shorter and colder weather finally having arrived to my portion of the world, I decided to the other of the beach movies that I had on my DVR, Beach Blanket Bingo.

Once again, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello are romantically paired, this time as Frankie and Dee Dee. I haven't seen all of the beach movies, so I don't know all the supporting characters, but apparently several of the cast members from previous beach movies return, albeit not quite in the same roles that they played in other movies. Among their beach bum friends is Jody McCrea as Bonehead, even more of a beach bum than anybody else in the cast and slightly off, but in a good way.

The basic plot, if you will, since I don't the plot is really the point of American International's beach movies, has a skydiver jumping out of a plane over the beach and parachuting into the ocean. The kids on the beach see a boat, and figure that the boat will pick her up, which is probably safer than all of them going out to rescue her. The boat does pick her up, but there's a catch. Bonnie (Deborah Walley), the jumper, is replaced by an identically outfitted Sugar Kane (Linda Evans, yes that Linda Evans), who jumps back into the ocean. It's all a publicity stunt. Sugar Kane's manager, Bullets (Paul Lynde), is trying to promote Sugar's new record, and needs somebody to "rescue" her for the stunt.

Frankie is the one that rescues her, and they briefly become a romantic item, not that Frankie is really interested in Sugar. And the teens really should have been more cynical and realized that this was a publicity stunt from the way Bullets talks. Instead, they're wowed by her jumping, and vow to take up jumping from jump school operator Big Drop (Don Rickles), his instructor Bonnie, and pilot Steve (John Ashley, who in real life was married to Deborah Walley at the time the movie was made). Bonnie wants more attention from Steve, so she pretends to like Frankie to try to get him into a love triangle that will get Steve to stand up for Bonnie.

As for Sugar, she and Bonehead become friends when Bonehead gets rescued out in the ocean by what he thinks is Sugar. Instead, it's actually Lorelei (Marta Kristen), a mermaid, and yes, with a tail and everything, but one who can fake legs and spend half a day or so out of the ocean on dry land. Naturally, nobody believes Bonehead really saw a mermaid. And Sugar Kane and Bonehead being a bit of an item gets Eric von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck), leader of the biker gang, jealous. They, with the help of South Dakota Slim (Timothy Carey), kidnap Sugar Kane, leaving everybody to believe that Bonehead accidentally left Sugar to drown out in the ocean.

Yeah, the plot is nutty, but then I don't think people watched the beach movies for the brilliant plots. Instead, the teens watched it for the music, although I think by the time Beach Blanket Bingo was released tastes were radically changing thanks to the British Invasion. Any grown-ups who might be part of the audience would watch for the cameos, which included Buster Keaton here, in his end-of-life comeback. Frankie Avalon is talented, but the song he's given to sing is really quite dated, sounding more like a late-50s ballad.

Still, Beach Blanket Bingo succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is to provide an hour and a half or so of light fluff and the opportunity to think about another summer coming up.

What! No Beer?

Buster Keaton signed a contract with MGM near the end of the silent era, and it proved to be a disaster in many ways. Part of that was his own fault, as he was in a failed marriage and started to drink even more heavily. But it didn't help that MGM's creative control didn't mesh well with Keaton's style of humor and moviemaking. To see how badly things went wrong, one can watch a movie like What! No Beer?.

Keaton plays a taxidermist, Elmer Butts. It's presumably late 1932, as there's an election coming up and one of the key issues is whether the keep the state "dry", which of course means in the sense of alcohol. Presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt had as one of his campaign planks repealing the 18th Amendment. Elmer doesn't seem particularly political, attending a "dry" rally only because a woman he'd like to pursue is going. Not so Elmer's good friend, the barber Jimmy Potts (Jimmy Durante). He's a committed wet, and since Elmer is apolitical, it doesn't take too much to convince Elmer to vote wet.

The wets win the election, although with the 18th Amendment still not officially repealed -- that would take another year -- it's not yet legal to produce and distribute alcohol. Not that Jimmy cares. He has an idea of buying a former brewery that had to close with the onset of Prohibition, and start making beer again, not that he knows anything about beer brewing. He also needs seed money, which he doesn't have. Ah, but Elmer does have it. Not that Elmer has a strong desire to go into the brewery business, but he wants to make enough money so that the woman from that dry rally will respect him and marry him.

Meanwhile, the bootleggers who have been producing illicit alcohol are none too happy with the new upstarts. Butch (John Miljan) happens to be the boyfriend of that woman Elmer dreams about, and is also one of the bootleggers. He meets with his nominal rival Spike (Edward Brophy) to figure out how to handle this new supply of beer that Jimmy is putting out.

That's the basic gist of What! No Beer?, and that's as far as it goes before falling off the rails. To me, there were a whole lot of problems. The first is that Durante and Keaton don't really mesh, and that's something MGM should have seen having made two earlier movies with the two in the cast (although apparently not working quite so closely as they did here). And then there are Keaton's gags, which are stale, with a beer keg scene that felt like it was a total rip-off of Seven Chances. The plot doesn't really work, either.

It's a shame that Buster Keaton would hit such lows in his career. He really deserved much beter from MGM.

Hollywood Cavalcade

Another of the box sets that I picked up ome time back was a five-film set of the movies of Alice Faye. One of the movies in the set that I hadn't blogged about before is Hollywood Cavalcade, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Faye plays Molly Adair, a stage actress in New York in 1913. She's successful on the stage, while the new medium of moving pictures is moving out west for various reasons. Michael Connors (Don Ameche) is a director who works for a Mack Sennett-like producer (Sennett, in fact, had a cameo in the movie), Sennett being the man who gave us the Keystone Kops and was instrumental in advancing Charlie Chaplin's career. The producer is always on the lookout for new talent, and Connors is sent east to sign Adair to a movie contract with the studio. Instead, Connors signs Adair to a personal contract.

Adair is supposed to star in romantic one- and two-reelers, but during filming of one of these shorts, a blooper happens in which the male lead (Buster Keaton playing himself) accidentally hits Molly in the face with a pie. This of course gets big laughs, and it gives Connors the idea to turn Molly into a comedy star. Now playing comedy, Molly becomes wildly successful, and Connors with her since he's got the rights to her contract.

This gives Connors the idea that perhaps he should start his own studio, bringing Molly with him as the new studio's big star. He needs money for that, but fortunately, a good friend, Dave Spingold (J. Edward Bromberg) has an uncle die and bequeath him the money that could be put to good use starting a new Hollywood studio. Connors has daring new ideas for the direction moving pictures should take, and thanks to having Molly, those ideas mostly work.

Connors wants to make Molly a "serious" actress again, and takes her out of comedy, pairing her with an unknown, Nicky Hayden (Alan Curtis). They form a successful screen team, but this is where things begin to go off the rails. Molly has always like Connors, to the point that she would be happy if he proposed marriage to her. Unfortunately, Connors is more in love with the idea of making movies than he is with Molly. Not that he dislikes Molly; she's more than a good friend. But he's just so busy with his work that he doesn't see the big flashing signs that Molly is in love with him and those two should be together.

Molly and Nicky are definitely good friends too, and since Mike doesn't see what's going on, Molly finally decides she's going to marry Nicky since he asks her. Besides, the fans, seeing the two of them paired on the screen together, think they're romantically involved in real life.

Molly's marriage to Nicky causes Mike to go off the deep end and start acting extremely irrationally. He rips up Molly's contract, and starts making a series of other mistakes that causes his movies to become flops. Eventually, it causes his studio to go bankrupt while Molly continues to be a big star. Eventually, she asks her studio to hire Mike to direct her next picture, even though the studio isn't so sure.

Two nearly simultaneous events cause the movie to face disaster. One is that Molly gets in a car accident that also kills Nicky, while the other is the advent of talking pictures. Will Mike be able to save the picture? Well, this is a light movie, so you can probably guess the answer.

One gets the feeling that Hollywood Cavalcade was originally conceived as a musical, of the sort that Fox liked to make. Not big and bold like MGM did, but more homespun and nostalgic, often looking at the past. It was a style that suited Alice Faye well, but for some reason, Fox wound up making this one not be a musical. Perhaps they didn't want it to be too closely related to Alexander's Ragtime Band, which came out a year earlier and has a lot of plot themes that resemble Hollywood Cavalcade. (There's also The Great American Broadcast, released two years later, and decidedly fitting into the same space. In any case, the material mostly works here, including a simulacrum of the old two-reeler comedies that were big hits two decades before the movie was released. That's because that section uses a lot of people who had been in the silent comedies.

At the same time, however, Hollywood Cavalcade also feels formulaic and a decided step down from Alexander's Ragtime Band. It's a good enough movie, and one that is great to have in a box set, but definitely a lesser Fox musical.

Belatedly Celebrating Buster Keaton

Last autumn was the 125th birth anniversary of silent screen genius Buster Keaton. TCM celebrated with a night of his movies, along with a relatively recent documentary, The Great Buster: A Celebration. I hadn't watched it before because I naturally figured it wasn't likely to be on DVD. But when I checked, I found out that it is in fact on DVD. So I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

Directed and narrated by Peter Bogdanovich, the movie is a fairly standard biography, albeit one that has a bunch of talking heads from the world of comedy talking about his movies. Keaton was born to parents traveling with a vaudeville show, so he gut put into performing at a very early age. Little Buster showed great talent for taking the throws that his father did. He became the star of the show, leaving when he was 21 so that he could make enough money to give his two younger siblings the education he didn't get.

In New York, he was going to star on Broadway, but got roped into doing a two-reeler with Fatty Arbuckle. He loved it and knew he wanted to go into the movies, which he did in a big way, eventually writing and directing his own movies because he could figure out how to make the gags work. In the last five years of the silent era, Keaton was extremely successful. But with the introduction of talking pictures, tragedy was to come.

Keaton signed a contract with MGM that stifled his creativity, leading him to drink more, and destroying his first marriage. He sank into obscurity, until his third marriage which lasted about 25 years until the end of his life. Eventually he was rediscovered in the final decade of his life and got to find out just how many movie buffs there were who actually liked his old silent films.

Keaton dies, but this comes only about two-thirds of the way into the movie. So for the last third, we get the 10 or so movies Keaton made during the last five years of the silent era, with Bogdanovich showing us scenes from most of them and telling us why he thinks these scenes are so successful, even if the films as a whole didn't always work.

There's not all that much going on here, so people who are already quite knowledgeable about Keaton may find it all a bit trite, and would prefer to rewatch the movies themselves. But for people who don't know much about silent cinema, I think it would make a pretty darn good introduction to one of the greats, along with starting with the two-reelers like One Week.

Coney Island

Tonight's Silent Sunday Nights lineup is a pair of movies with Buster Keaton. First, at midnight tonight, is Go West. That one has Buster eventually becoming a ranch-hand, and then driving a herd of cattle through the crowded streets of Los Angeles. As of this writing there's a Youtube posting, but the movie was from 1925, which means that it's not in the public domain the the video could be pulled at any time due to copyright restrictions.

The second movie, at 1:15 AM, is the short Coney Island. This is from much earlier in Keaton's career, in 1917 when he was still working with Fatty Arbuckle. Since it's before 1923, it is in the public domain, so the Youtube videos of it shouldn't be taken down. Well, I suppose if they use music that's not in the public domain that might be a problem. Heaven knows there are music rights holders who are nuts about their music showing up in Youtube videos, even brief snippets in the background.

Anyhow, for those who want to see Coney Island, here's one of the Youtube videos:

Buster Keaton builds his dream house

This second week of The Story of Film on TCM looks more or less at the second half of the silent era. Tonight is going to look at some of the great silent comic filmmakers, while tomorrow sees some of the achievements in dramatic silent films. It all kicks off at 8:00 PM with Buster Keaton's One Week.

Keaton plays The Groom, a newly-married man, having just married The Bride (Sybil Seely). The Groom (otherwise unnamed) has received a present from his uncle: a pre-fabricated house kit. Just insert tab A into slot B, follow the rest of the numbered instructions like a paint-by-number painting, and at the end of the process, you've got a nice little house for a newlywed couple to live in.

Yeah, right. There's no way it could ever be this easy in real life, and of course we wouldn't even have a two-reel comic short if it were easy in the movie, too. Let's disregard the fact that the kit looks way, way too small to wind up as a pre-fab house; there are other problems with the kit, such as the various numbered directions having been mixed-up. But The Groom tries to build the house anyway.

Told in the form of vignettes over the course of one week, with pages of a calendar charting the progress of the week, One Week looks at The Groom's attempt to build that house, and everything that goes wrong. And even for a two-reel short, we can say that Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings would have been aghast at all the problems that this poor Groom has to face. It doesn't seem to help him that his Bride seems to want to live in the house as it's being built around her. Eventually, though, the house does get built, although let's say that it doesn't look like what the kit suggests it ought to look like.

After finally getting the house built, our poor Groom faces one more problem: apparently a 6 got turned upside-down for a 9, and Keaton has built the house on the wrong lot! It's enough to drive a man to the breaking point, but this allegedly being a "portable" house from a kit, Keaton simply tries to drive it to the correct lot attached to the back of his jalopy.

One Week, like a lot of Keaton comedies, is filled with inventive sight gags that will keep everybody laughing. Even children should have no difficulties getting the sight gags, and it's all as clean as the classic cartoons. A few of the stunts are a thing to behold too, since stuntwork wasn't as advanced in 1920 as it is today. As with the front of the house falling around Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr., or Lillian Gish on an ice floe in Way Down East which TCM aired last week, what looks like it has no safety mechanism around sometimes really doesn't.

TCM's online shop doesn't list One Week as being on DVD, but Amazon does, as in this disc of four two-reel silent comedies. At any rate, having been released in 1920, One Week is in the public domain, and you can see it on Youtube too.

Early Color Shorts

TCM has a couple of shorts on today's lineup that ar OK, but more interesting for the fact that they're among the earliest live-action shorts in the three-strip Technicolor process.

The first of them is La Cucaracha at about 7:35 PM, just after That Hamilton Woman. You probably recognize the title as that of a Mexican-sounding children's song, and in fact the song features prominently in the short. The plot, which is a bit wanting, involves a female singer and her male dancer partner in a Mexican club who are visited by a producer from the big time who is looking to sign the dancer, and only the dancer, to a bigger gig. The singer obviously is afraid of losing her partner, so she tries to sabotage things. You can probably guess what happens next. The print I remember seeing on TCM some years back wasn't quite as good as prints of some other early three-strip shorts. The short has been included as an extra on an out-of-print DVD of the Wheeler and Woolsey movie Dixiana. It also appears to be on Youtube.

The second short is La Fiesta de Santa Barbara, at 5:35 AM after The Private Life of Henry VIII. This one has even less of a plot; it's a bunch of Hollywood players -- some stars and some not-yet-stars -- celebrating a fiesta in Santa Barbara with a bunch of novelty performance. Andy Devine is part of a bullfighting bit with, I believe, Buster Keaton; Warner Baxter, Robert Taylor, and Gary Cooper show up in the audience. Ida Lupino wasn't a star yet, but she shows up as a cowgirl. Really. The short is probably best known for Judy Garland and her sisters singing "La Cucaracha". Multiple people have posted this one to Youtube. There's a version split into two parts, and one that seems to be in its entirety, although a caveat is that I didn't watch the Youtube videos at any of the links.

One Week

I wrote up three posts back in October when Buster Keaton was TCM Star of the Month, and didn't mention the fun short One Week. It's airing again tonight at 7:00 PM, and if this isn't enough warning for you, you should be able to find it on DVD.

The plot, as with most of Keaton's two-reelers, is simple. Keaton plays a new groom who, with his bride, finds he's been given a nice wedding present by his uncle: a pre-fabricated house, and a lot to put it on. Well, it's a 1920 version of a pre-fabricated house, meaning that it's a house-in-a-box (the boxes look decidedly too small, but that's beside the point) with a series of numbered boxes that show the order in which the house goes together. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

Of course, this being a Buster Keaton comedy, you know that things aren't going to go the way they're supposed to. First of all, the house winds up looking not at all like it's supposed to. You wonder whether they had a level among the tools they used to build the house. That, and the house could have used a foundation, a problem that everybody notices the first time there's a stiff breeze. And to make matters worse, they find they've built on the wrong lot.

One Week is a quite entertaining little two-reeler. It's followed on the schedule by another two-reeler I'd never heard of, called The Flame Song (start time approximately 7:28 PM). This one is apparently a 1934 short remake of a 1930 operetta called Song of the Flame, the film elements of which have been lost. I'm not into operetta, and haven't particularly enjoyed the Jeanette MacDonald films that get shown on TCM from time to time, but for those of you who like this sort of film it's probably worth a watch. And I don't think it's on DVD either.

Buster Keaton's early talkies

Last week, I mentioned that TCM was showing a documentary about Buster Keaton's contract with MGM at the dawn of the talking pictures era that resulted in his career seriously going south. As part of tonight's Star of the Month salute to Keaton, you can see four of his lesser efforts from that era, so that you can judge for yourself how much the studio was at fault for ruining Keaton's career.

First, overnight at 2:15 AM is the military comedy Doughboys.
That's followed at 3:45 AM by Parlor, Bedroom, and Bath, in which Keaton is recruited as un unwilling playboy.
At 5:15 AM, you can watch The Passionate Plumber, in which Keaton is a plumber-turned-lover.
Finally, at 6:30 AM, there is What, No Beer? in which Keaton tries to get into the beer business after Prohitibion only to find the Mob has taken it over.

The last two at least co-star Jimmy Durante.

Civil War comedy

If Hollywood can make comedies about World War II like Operation Petticoat, then there's no reason why they can't make comedies about, say, the Civil War. In fact, as part of TCM's look at the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, they'll be showing several comedies on Wednesday evening. Tonight's look at the Civil War sees a number of silent movies. However, these silent films include a comedy, that being Buster Keaton's classic The General, overnight at 1:00 AM ET.

Keaton plays a little man in the old South. When the Civil War begins, he wants to enlist just as any other patriotic Southerner would. However, he's deemed unfit, and besides, he's working as an engineer. That's just as important a job as actually fighting in the army. In fact, we get to see its importance when invading Union troops try to capture Keaton's locomotive, take it north to Union territory, and destroy the railroad tracks along the way. Keaton is the only one who can stop the Northerners, albeit with a little help from his would-be girlfriend (Marion Mack).

The General is a fairly simple story, but one that works extremely well thanks to Keaton's typically imaginative and spectacular sight gags. In the case of The General, that meant getting a vintage locomotive and finding a narrow-gauge track in Oregon, and literally destroying things along the way. As with Steamboat Bill, Jr., these are the sort of things that had to be done in one take, lest the actors get seriously injured. If you haven't seen The General before, shame on you! Watch it now, or since it's coming on in the middle of the night, record it. Or get one of the many DVD releases.

A pair of Buster Keaton movies

This week's Silent Sunday Nights feature on TCM brings us a pair of movies made by Buster Keaton. Sherlock, Jr. kicks off the night at midnight ET tonight, and is followed at 1:00 AM by The Navigator.

The Navigator follows Keaton's well-known plot formula: Boy loves Girl, but some circumstances prevent Boy from getting Girl. This time, Keaton's Boy is a member of the idle rich, who love the similarly idle rich Girl (Kathryn McGuire, who also plays The Girl in Sherlock Jr.) who lives across the street from him. Boy proposes to Girl, but she refuses. Boy tries to drown his sorrows by taking the sea cruise he would have taken had he gone on his honeymoon with Girl, but makes the mistake of getting on the wrong ship, one that's being scrapped, and finds himself the next morning adrift at sea. Interestingly, Boy gets the distinct feeling that there's somebody else aboard. It turns out that there is: it's The Girl. Drawn together by fate, the two have to try to survive aboard the ship, while getting somebody to find them and take them back to safety.

It's an environment that's fertile ground for Keaton's brand of physical humor. Keaton had apparently wanted to do a ship-board movie for some time, and when one of his close associates found out that the US Navy was going to be scrapping a ship, it was decided that this would be the perfect chance for Keaton to have ready-made ship sets for a movie. Indeed, there is quite a bit of opportunity here for Keaton to give us some great visuals. First comes the scenes where his Boy thinks there's somebody else on the ship. We see The Girl, and we see how she too has come to believe that she's not alone on the boat. Both are searching for the possibly nonexistent other person, and they both just keep missing each other. Later, there's a scene of the two trying to make breakfast for two in an industrial galley, where everything is designed for two hundred. Finally, the ship runs aground, and Keaton has to get out and go underwater to repair the propeller. It's pretty remarkable underwater photography for 1924.

The Navigator may not be Buster Keaton's very best movie, but it's quite good, and can be enjoyed by young and old alike.