By now, the world has come around: the decades and decades of Chaplin domination have finally receded, and we’re all newly-born Keatonians. Why exactly this has happened is harder to parse—perhaps Buster Keaton appeals to a savvier, mass-media-educated culture, less naïve than the more guileless early-century global viewership Charles Chaplin enjoyed? If we do indeed dare to hazard an analysis, I’d guess it has a good deal to do with Keaton’s signature restraint and heroic modesty, which was always in sharp contrast to Chaplin’s pandering and self-aggrandizement. For one thing, Keaton’s set-pieces are rarely cute and begging for our approval; they can be, in fact, breathtaking and ambitious beyond the demands of comedy. But Keaton also doesn’t date as a personality; he’s thoughtful, introverted, and unperturbable in a modern way that certainly suits cinematic close-ups, gazing out, not at us but into the whirlwind of circumstance, while Chaplin can seem to be very much a latent relic of the 19th century, down to his camera-winking as if from the edge of a vaudeville stage. The subject of at least three book-length biography-appreciations in the last two years alone (including a graphic novel), as his cult continues to expand and his films continue to get restored and screened, Keaton has become the silent-era G.O.A.T. for the 21st century, the timeless and heroic mystery man at the center of some of movies’ most original acts of daring and grace.
There isn’t, we can confidently say, such a thing as a Keaton detractor, or even a Keaton-neutral movie-lover. And so The Navigator (1924) is required viewing, being the fifth of his thirteen silent features and made the same year as the supreme meta-movie Sherlock Jr. (It was also the year he stopped making two-reelers altogether, focusing on features as both Chaplin and Harold Lloyd had begun to do the year before.) Codirected by Donald Crisp (who had tutored under Griffith and busily spent the silent era directing whenever he wasn’t acting), The Navigator is a blissful dose of Keatonian intoxicant, with all of the visual precision, effortless rapport, and filmmaking savoir-faire that implies. In a Keaton film, you always have the sense that the camera is in the perfect spot, the action will unfold with diamond-cut rhythm, and the strain of making it all happen, even the impossible things, will not show.
The film began with the ship—a 500-foot cargo liner that Keaton’s art director found in San Francisco, waiting to be stripped for scrap metal. (The boat had actually been used by the Army during World War I and had reportedly been once employed to deport exiled Communists to Russia, including Emma Goldman.) Titled, like The General, after the vessel’s name, not a character, the movie seems to utilize every square inch of the ship for comedic purposes. The setup is tossed at us so briskly it’s as if Keaton knew it hardly matters: it’s some wartime or another and there are spies afoot, conspiring to A) send a certain ship, meant for the opposing side, adrift, and B) kidnap its owner, a shipping magnate with a spoiled daughter, Betsy (Kathryn McGuire). It so happens that across the street from her lives wealthy bachelor Rollo Treadway (Keaton), an apparently clueless and hyper-privileged drip who, upon glimpsing a pair of happy newlyweds, decides he’ll marry Betsy and go on a honeymoon, that day. She scoffs at him, of course, and so he decides to embark on his own anyway, and thanks to series of absurd mistakes, ends up on the empty boat, along with Betsy, right before it’s cut loose.
In the morning, both of the ersatz stowaways, unaware of each other’s presence, search what they think is a mysteriously empty and drifting ship, continually missing each other in a sequence brimming with Keaton’s visual confidence—we end up with the two characters scrambling over three decks and six staircases, all in one master shot. Once they find each other, no corner of the setting, or of the premise, goes unexplored, from the rich kids ineptly trying to cook breakfast for themselves, to sinking a lifeboat, to donning a deep-sea diving suit to repair a hull leak (and have a swordfight with a swordfish), to fending off the perhaps-now questionable onslaught of “cannibal” island natives, and so restlessly on. We even get, in the end, aboard a deus ex machina submarine, the first-ever rotating-set trick shot later employed in Royal Wedding (1951), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Inception (2010), and, of course, the music video for Lionel Ritchie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” (1986).
It might sound like a lot, particularly for a film that’s literally one minute short of an hour, but, as always, Keaton, often with little more than a shrug or perhaps the unassuming deftness of a prime athlete, makes it flow like a daydream. (Again, compare the tense pathos and gag setup stress of Chaplin or Lloyd.) That may be the crucial consideration with Keaton: how his visual style—mise-en-scène plus montage, framing plus timing, always striving toward a full-frontal this-really-happened realism—dovetails with his famously reserved performative affect. The two currents rhyme and complement, demanding our attention; you could think of his sensibility as a martial-art-inflected decision to bend like a reed in the wind, forcing us to lean into him. His haunting lighthouse gaze is always searching for the solution to an absurd problem, inviting us into his crises. He is “a geometrician,” critic Raymond Durgnat wrote in the ‘60s, long before the Keaton zeitgeist fully took hold. “His solemn face conceals the whirring gyroscope of inner-direction.”
The Navigator doesn’t come with a lot of subtexts, unlike Sherlock Jr. Even its gentle class-conscious lampooning of the clueless rich, adjacent to Keaton’s first feature The Saphead (1920), is neutered soon enough by Rollo’s explosive resourcefulness and bravery (when Betsy can’t climb up the forty-foot ladder on the ship’s side, Rollo just launches from the railing into the sea to help her up). Sherlock Jr. did only moderately well at the box office, so perhaps Keaton aimed to keep his next scenario uncluttered with ambiguity. But that doesn’t mean the film was a breeze; a forty-sailor crew was hired to run the ship, and the underwater scenes ended up being shot in Lake Tahoe, at outrageous expense. Crisp, hired to handle the few standard dramatic scenes, became an amateur gagman annoyance, and Keaton literally lied to him about the shoot being complete just to get rid of him.
The film was, in any event, the hit Keaton needed, and it enabled him to push the limits of the system he was in—an independent producer distributed by United Artists (still co-owned by Chaplin)—with The General (1926) and Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928). Both of those films were spectacular, fabulously costly, and ultimately unsuccessful, which compelled United Artists to handcuff Keaton’s creative profligacy, thereby leading him to sign on with MGM, which he famously wrote in his memoirs was the beginning of the end for his career.
Of course, the coming of sound was a factor, too. Keaton was one of the talkie revolution’s most famous casualties. Much was gained, but a good deal was lost. With Keaton’s eclipse we saw the last of the crazy eloquence and stoic fluency of the silent era’s most sublime incarnation, the odd, decisive sloe-eyed figure who never seemed to grow dated, and who may, for generations hence, represent the entire bygone culture paradigm all by himself.
Presented at ADoS 2025 with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra