The Navigator

Buster “Keaton moves in the mechanised world of today like the inhabitant of another planet. He gazes with frozen bewilderment at a nightmare reality. Inventions and contrivances like deck chairs and railroad engines seem insuperably animate to him, in the same measure that human beings become impersonal.” Arthur Mayer. In “The Navigator”, which grossed more than any other Keaton film, it was a huge luxury liner. There is the famous sequence in which Keaton gloomily sets about cooking his breakfast, in a ship’s galley equipped to feed five hundred people. Painfully, he times an egg as it boils in a huge cauldron. The plot of “The Navigator” inverts the problem of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe had to create the rudiments of civilisation on a desert island. Keaton, playing a dim-witted millionaire, finds himself and his girl marooned in an over-technical environment. He has to create the basis for crude existence. Considered by many Keaton buffs to be the funniest film he ever made.