11
The Navigator
RELEASED NATIONALLY on September 24, 1923, Three Ages was a tough sell with exhibitors, who, according to Variety, “shied at it to a remarkable extent.” Trade notices were mixed, with Variety and Exhibitors Trade Review delivering solid raves. “On the Sunday night aspect of attendance,” wrote Variety’s Rush Greason, “the picture will get a big public following and it should, for it is first class screen amusement by a distinct personality and one of the best legitimate comedians we have, either for screen or for the stage.” Billboard, on the other hand, couldn’t discern enough comedy to justify the length: “The picture is really made up of three two-reelers, each the same in story, the only difference lying in the interpretative action in the three ages. After Three Ages gets past the half-way mark it becomes acutely boring.”
The New York dailies were similarly divided, with the American, Evening World, Post, and Tribune cheering the picture, and the Mail, Morning Telegraph, and Sun turning thumbs down. The Times, significantly, ignored it entirely. The film did good business during initial stands in key cities, such as Washington, Philadelphia, and Boston, but soon played itself out. Keaton made a quick trip east to attend the World Series, and Three Ages went completely unmentioned during an interview he gave the Telegraph. “It was difficult to make him say anything,” the interviewer, Dorothy Day, complained. “I never saw anybody so unwilling to talk.” After a few moments of silence, she asked how he liked the games.
“Oh, the games,” he responded. “They were fine.”
“Were you satisfied with the outcome of them?”
“Sure. I bet on the Yanks.”
“Did you win much?”
“Not much. A couple of dinners and the tickets.”
He fumbled with a watch chain and produced a little platinum locket, which he opened to reveal the cherubic face of Buster Jr.
“Does he look like you?” she asked.
“Exactly,” he said, finally showing some enthusiasm. “He’s a great kid. And there’s a vacant space in the other side of the locket, you may have noticed. I’m reserving that.”
A British journalist named Margaret Werner detected a similar reluctance unless the subject was parenthood. “The kid is going to be his own boss,” Keaton, waxing eloquent, told her, “and whatever profession appeals to him when he grows up, well, that’s the profession he’s going to ornament. President or plumber, it’s what little Buster chooses. That’s the way they’re bringing them up nowadays. The individuality of the child and all that. The kid’s recovering now from a long siege of work. There were three generations of us in Hospitality—my dad, my son, and myself.”
Back in California, he traveled to San Francisco for the world premiere of Hospitality, housed once more at Loew’s Warfield, where Three Ages had made its stateside bow. Accompanying him were Lou Anger, Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell, Clyde Bruckman, and Roscoe Arbuckle, who was eager to attend the opening-day festivities at Tanforan Racetrack and drew more attention than the others combined. “Just came up with the boys to take in the races,” he said, brushing off a reporter from the Chronicle. When asked if he had any comment on a divorce action filed October 22 by his wife, Minta, he replied, “No, she said it all.”
Hospitality logged even better numbers than Three Ages in its opening weekend, near capacity for all showings and another house record of $19,000 for the week. Contributing were wall-to-wall positives in the Chronicle, Examiner, Journal, News, Bulletin, and Call, all seconded by Variety’s Frisco correspondent: “The star hangs over cliffs hundreds of feet in the air, rides a log down a seething rapids, and manages to save himself at the brink of the waterfall, which looks a mile high. This scene particularly is a real thrill and kept the audience on edge, gasping with fear one minute and laughing the next.”
As Keaton once remarked, “The best way to get a laugh is to create a genuine thrill and then relieve the tension with comedy. Getting laughs depends on the element of surprise, and surprises are getting harder and harder to get as audiences, seeing more pictures, become more and more comedy-wise. But when you take a genuine thrill, build up to it, and then turn it into a ridiculous situation, you always get that surprise element.”
The film’s formal release, under the title Our Hospitality, came on November 19, 1923. Mirroring the San Francisco dailies, all the New York papers praised it, some extravagantly. The trades were nearly as unanimous, Helen Swenson in Exhibitors Trade Review calling it “one of the most humorous pictures ever produced” and going on to praise its comedy as based “on the solid foundation of a good story.” The one outlier within the industry was Billboard, which inexplicably found long stretches of the picture tiresome. “It is a genuine pity that Keaton ever went into the feature field. His short comedies were scintillating gems of comedy; his features are plain window glass with an occasional glint.”
The public embraced Our Hospitality wholeheartedly, delivering worldwide rentals of $537,844, a 20 percent jump over the $448,606 reported for Three Ages. Late in life, Keaton recalled the costs of his features as being lower than either Harold Lloyd’s or Charlie Chaplin’s. “I ran around $225,000 to the picture,” he said. “That would include my salary. Harold Lloyd, he would go a little more than that, and Chaplin went higher still.” Given the consistent profitability of the Keaton and Talmadge features, Joe Schenck ordered no year-end slowdown in their production, despite shutdowns at Famous Players and Universal caused, in part, by huge backlogs of unreleased negative. To the press, he reiterated his intention of going forward with a year’s program of nine features budgeted at $3,500,000, with Keaton responsible for two. At the time of Schenck’s statement, Constance Talmadge was shooting The Goldfish, Norma was finishing Secrets, and Keaton was making his third feature comedy, the working title for which was The Misfit.
The impetus for The Misfit was almost certainly Merton of the Movies, a sharp satire of the picture business that opened on Broadway in November 1922. Keaton, who was informally scouting stage properties for Dutch Talmadge, was instantly drawn to the character of Merton Gill—a small-town boob who dreams of Hollywood stardom—and openly said he wanted to play the part on-screen. The sticking point was that the show’s star, Glenn Hunter, was under contract to Famous Players, and it was widely assumed that Paramount would have the inside track on any deal for the film rights. While in New York for the 1923 World Series, Keaton had shot a look of disapproval at his questioner from the Telegraph when asked if he harbored secret longings to play Hamlet or Macbeth. He did, however, allow as how he would like to play Merton of the Movies.
“Had Buster got the play rights,” suggested Motion Picture magazine, “we would have had in him a ‘different’ Merton, but with Famous Players-Lasky in possession, Glenn Hunter will register his delightful version of the pathetic movie hero on the screen….Well, anyhow, Buster Keaton has secured a story on similar lines: The Misfit. It tells of a projection machine operator, again a small town hero, who goes to Hollywood to make his fortune and fully becomes a millionaire-producer. Between the first and last exposures appear many scenes of Mertonish poignancy. In the cast are Buster himself and Kathryn McGuire, an ex-beauty of the Mack Sennett tribe.”
Kathryn McGuire’s presence in the cast resulted from one of the picture’s early setbacks, for when filming commenced in mid-November, Marion Harlan, the nineteen-year-old daughter of actor Otis Harlan, was the girl in the story. Harlan apparently shot for several weeks before she had to withdraw due to illness, and McGuire replaced her in mid-December. By then, Keaton had been forced to abandon the idea of bringing his character to Hollywood, and a new device had to be found to set the action in motion. In desperation, he returned to a setup similar to the modern story in Three Ages: two suitors for the same girl, one good and one bad. Due to the chicanery of his rival, Buster is unjustly accused of theft and ordered from the house. He must solve the crime to redeem himself, sparking a burlesque of the detective genre most recently exploited by John Barrymore in Sherlock Holmes. In fact, it was courtesy of the Barrymore release that the film acquired its permanent title: Sherlock Jr.
“I think the reason we started off on that story,” Keaton remarked, “is because I had one of the best cameramen in the picture business, Elgin Lessley. He originally was with Sennett. Now I laid out a few of these tricks; [and] some of these tricks I knew from the stage. I seldom did camera tricks. I tried to do the real illusion. (I have done an awful lot of camera tricks too, as far as that goes.) But I laid out some of those gags. And the technical man that builds the sets, I showed him how I have to get them built for the things I had to do. [When] we got that batch of stuff together, [Lessley] said, ‘You can’t do it and tell a legitimate story, because there are illusions and some of them are clown gags, some Houdini, some Ching Ling Foo. It’s got to come in a dream. To get what we’re after, you’ve got to be a projectionist in a projecting room in the little local small-town motion picture theater, and go to sleep after you’ve got the picture started. Once you fall asleep, you visualize yourself as one of the important characters in the picture you’re showing. [You] go down out of that projection room, go right down, and then walk up onto the screen and become a part of it. Now you tell your whole story.’
“And all I had to round out was that I was in trouble at the start of the picture with my girl’s father. He thought I stole his watch. Well, on the screen I became the world’s greatest detective to solve this mystery. Of course, while I’m asleep the girl finds out that I didn’t steal it, and she was the one who woke me up at the finish. But on the screen I was a son-of-a-gun, the world’s greatest detective. No matter how they tried to surround me and kill me or get me, I got out of it.”
Putting Buster into the movie itself and having him interact with all the characters on-screen—as well as the conventions of filmmaking—would be Lessley’s department. “That was the reason for making the whole picture. Just that one situation: that a motion picture projectionist in a theater goes to sleep and visualizes himself getting mixed up with the characters on the screen. All right, then my job was to transform those characters on the screen into [the projectionist’s] characters at home, and then I’ve got my plot.”
Sherlock Jr. started out modestly, keeping to Keaton’s policy of never going for big gags at the start of a picture. Buster is sweeping out the theater and finds three dollars in the pile of trash. A young woman appears and says she lost a dollar. Reluctantly, he returns it to her (after having her describe it). Then an old lady comes along and hands him the same story. He forks over another dollar. Finally, a ruffian appears and Buster hands over the third dollar, no questions asked. The man hands it back, then rummages through the pile of trash and recovers a whole wallet with a thick wad of cash in it. Buster takes the one dollar he has left and goes next door to a confectionary to buy candy for Kathryn. Then he marches off to the house she shares with her father (Joe Keaton). Here is where his rival, the local sheik—Keaton’s pal Ward Crane—steals the father’s watch, pawns it, and pins the crime on Buster.
Jack Blystone having resigned as co-director, Keaton tried shooting the film himself. Then he got to thinking about his pal Arbuckle. (“Roscoe was down in the dumps and broke.”) According to Viola Dana, Keaton got Arbuckle to visit him on the set: “He told Roscoe he was needed in a creative capacity to get more laughs out of the opening scenes.” In terms of credit, they couldn’t use his real name, so Keaton jokingly suggested “Will B. Good.” Arbuckle himself settled on “William Goodrich,” which were his father’s first and middle names.
“So we hire him as a director for me,” said Keaton, “and at the end of about three days we saw our mistake. He is now so irritable and impatient and loses his temper so easily. He’s screaming at people, getting flushed and mad, and of course things don’t go so well. In other words, he hadn’t recovered yet from those trials of being accused of murder and nearly convicted. It just changed his disposition.”
Vi Dana added: “There were never any problems between Roscoe and Buster until Peg Talmadge showed up and demanded to know why Roscoe was there, and who was paying and how much. And then Roscoe would take it out on poor Kathryn McGuire, a lovely girl, a trained dancer. Kathryn was no Mabel [Normand] and she never could do what Mabel could do. Buster, always the diplomat when it came to dealing with Roscoe, thanked him for his help and told him he now had a handle on the film. Roscoe, equally polite, knew better than to question Buster’s judgment. It was, after all, Buster’s film. It was better to remain friends. Which they did.”
Arbuckle went back to directing Al St. John, but a surprising thing happened in April 1924 during a National Vaudeville Artists benefit at L.A.’s Philharmonic Auditorium. During a change of acts the curtain went up by mistake, revealing that one of the volunteer scene-shifters was none other than Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. In overalls, he was a familiar sight moving a piano offstage, and the audience broke into applause, whistles, and finally cheers as he advanced to the footlights to say a few words. The demonstration, in fact, inspired a twelve-week tour of the Pantages circuit, which began the following month in San Francisco. Again Arbuckle was warmly welcomed, with a packed house according him a two-minute standing ovation. In Los Angeles, he was awarded an enormous floral statue of himself—baggy trousers, brown derby—as a gift from old friends in the industry. It was so heavy it required four men to lift it. On his opening night in San Diego, a huge American flag of carnations was presented “in memory of his work during the world war” when he served tirelessly as a celebrity recruiter and godfather of the 159th Infantry, Company C, which he sent off to France with several thousand dollars for their treasury.
The tour progressed to Pantages houses in Long Beach, Salt Lake City, and Detroit, each performance kicked off with a special film made at the Keaton studio in which both Buster and Al St. John help Roscoe break back into show business—and into his dressing room. The Pantages tour was so successful that Arbuckle signed with a new manager, Perry Kelly, who generally toured road companies and who booked him into secondary markets such as Toledo, Grand Rapids, and Milwaukee. When Arbuckle again played San Francisco in November, the act was largely the same—a monologue of reading and answering letters from fans—but still doing turn-away business.
“He looks a little thinner than the last time here,” observed Billboard ’s E. J. Wood, “and he has regained most of his old-time assurance. He made a good short curtain speech and is now thoroughly re-established in this city. Four curtain calls.”
“So then I went ahead,” said Keaton, “threw the first three days’ stuff in the ashcan, started from scratch and made the picture.” The big challenge, of course, was how to create the illusion of Buster inserting himself into the movie up on the screen. The first time he jumps into the frame, one of the on-screen characters tosses him back. The second time he makes his approach, the scene abruptly changes from the interior of a large room to the exterior of an ornate entryway and he must struggle to avoid hitting the door head on. A formally dressed character opens the door, steps through it, remembers something, walks back inside. Buster runs up and knocks on the door, only to have the scene change to a garden setting and he tumbles off an outdoor bench. Picking himself up, he begins to seat himself on the bench when the scene changes to a city street and he falls backwards, dodging traffic. Walking away, the scene cuts again to a mountain setting and he almost steps off into thin air. Peering over the edge, another cut places him in the midst of a pair of lions. Then a desert with a passing train. Then an ocean reef. Then a snow scene. And so on.
The dreaming projectionist approaches the screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924). Joe Keaton, in evening clothes, emerges as a character in the movie.
“We built what looked like a motion picture screen,” he explained, “and actually built a stage into that frame but lit it in such a way that it looked like a motion picture being projected on a screen. But it was real actors, and the lighting effect gave us the illusion so I could go out of semi-darkness into that well-lit screen right from the front row of the theater [and] right into the picture. Then when it came to the scene changing on me when I got up there, that was a case of timing and on every one of those things we would measure the distance to a fraction of an inch from the camera to where I was standing…to get the exact height and angle so that there wouldn’t be a fraction of an inch missing on me, and then we changed the setting to what we wanted it to be and I got back into that same spot and it overlapped the action to get the effect of the scene changing.”
Moving out of doors, the surroundings of the theater remained, but the screen itself was blacked out so that the film could be rewound and Keaton captured in the unexposed portion of the frame. At times in later years, he said that he used surveyor’s instruments to get the effect, but in his 1964 talk with Kevin Brownlow, he specifically said that he didn’t: “All we needed was the exact distance, and the cameraman could judge the height. And by using a traveling matte from the other take—which you could do, see—they get me into position here and they crank [a few feet]. They throw [that exposed film] in the darkroom and develop it right there and then and bring it back to [the cameraman], and he cuts out those frames and puts it in [the camera gate]. When I come to change scenes, he can put me right square where I was, as long as that distance was correct.”
For the shot on the ocean reef with the waves crashing around him, Keaton described how he matched the transition to the snow: “As I looked down [from the rock] I held still for a moment, and we ended that scene. Then we brought out tape measures, put a crossbar in front of the camera to square it off, and measured me from two angles. That made sure that I was in exactly the same spot as far as the camera was concerned.”
The film-within-a-film is called Hearts and Pearls, and the characters dissolve into the ones Buster is contending with in real life, again played by Ward Crane, Kathryn McGuire, and Joe Keaton. When a string of pearls is discovered missing, the great detective is summoned to crack the case. What he doesn’t know is that the house has been booby-trapped by the thieves. Poison drinks and deadly chairs are offered, and a game of pocket billiards is played with an exploding ball. The action moves outdoors, and here Keaton conjures the stage illusions that prompted Elgin Lessley to tell him they had to come in a dream. With the aid of his assistant, a man called Gillette (“a gem who was ever-ready in a bad scrape”), Buster grabs the pearls in the thieves’ hideaway, leaps through a hooped window, and is instantly costumed for his escape as an old woman. Discovered, he is chased into a blind alley, where it is Gillette’s turn to pose as an old woman peddling neckties from a display case. Cornered, Buster leaps through the case Gillette is holding in his hands and seemingly vanishes into thin air.
Sherlock Jr. is about to go racing down Santa Monica Boulevard on the handlebars of an unmanned motorcycle.
Once again on the run, he is pulled over by a motorcycle cop who turns out to be the faithful Gillette in yet another disguise. Buster jumps onto the handlebars, and they race off to the rescue of Kathryn, who is being held by the mob. The cycle, however, hits a watery hazard in the middle of the street, and Gillette is thrown off.[*] Buster, still on the handlebars and unaware he’s now the only one on the machine, continues on. “The control of the gas is [on the handlebars] for speed, but I’ve got no brakes. You’ve got to have a strong arm to get your feet back down there, ’cause it was footbrakes, see. Well, I got some beautiful spills before I could get back. Some beauties. I parked right up on top of an automobile once. I hit it head on, and I ended up with my fanny up against the windshield, my feet straight in the air.”
Onward he speeds, dodging traffic, feet in the air, oblivious to the fact that he’s entirely alone. “Be careful or one of us will get hurt,” he warns the missing pilot as he zooms along Santa Monica Boulevard. In short order he upends a pedestrian, takes a shovelful of dirt in the face from each worker in a line of ditch diggers, plows through an Irish picnic, barrels over an unfinished bridge just as two cargo trucks momentarily complete the gap, is saved by a perfectly timed blast of dynamite that splinters a fallen tree in his path, roars under an elevated tractor, narrowly misses an oncoming locomotive, and goes flying off the handlebars when the bike hits a logged barrier, crashing through the window of a remote shack and hitting the girl’s captor feetfirst, knocking him through the far wall. Throughout this astonishing three-minute sequence, the pace never lags, with all the disparate elements as fluid as a single continuous motion.
One of the last scenes to be shot could have proved ruinous. Rule 5 in the handbook How to Be a Detective is “Shadow your man closely.” So Buster sets off to follow his suspect, generally keeping within inches of the guy. He stalks him onto a train platform and, once noticed, continues right on into a boxcar, only to have the door bolted shut behind him. As it begins to move, Buster emerges onto the roof of the car and starts running toward the rear of the train until it abruptly ends and he’s forced to grab on to the rope dangling from the spout of a water tower to break his fall. What Keaton didn’t realize at the time was that the stunt and its aftermath had broken his neck.
“Of course all my weight pulls on the rope, and of course I pull the spout down and it drenches me with water. Well, when you’re up on top of a freight car you’re up there twelve feet high and that water spout is a ten-inch pipe. I didn’t know how strong that water pressure was. Well, it just tore my grip loose as if I had no grip at all and dropped me the minute it hit me. And I lit on my back with my head right across the rail—the rail right on my neck. It was a pretty hard fall, and that water pushed me down….I had a headache for a few hours….I said, ‘I want a drink.’ I turned at the next block coming back from location—it was out there in the [San Fernando] Valley someplace. I went in to [see] Mildred Harris, Charlie Chaplin’s first wife, and I went into her house and she gave me a couple of stiff drinks. During Prohibition, see, when you couldn’t just stop anyplace to get a drink. So, that numbed me enough that I woke up the following morning, my head was clear and I never stopped working.”
Sherlock Jr. was completed the week of February 4, 1924, and Keaton, as usual, was looking forward to putting it in front of an audience. “One of the main reasons for takin’ it out of town was so that none of the carpenters or extra people or anybody connected with studios would be in that audience. Because if we had an outstanding sequence or cute gags or good gags or anything like that, these people would sell it to other studios. Sometimes they’d sell it, and sometimes just to get in good with somebody [they’d say], ‘Here’d be a good gag for you.’ And we had that happen to us a few times. So our previews—we’d take ’em out to Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara, Riverside, Santa Ana—places like that. And we don’t tell the audience they’re lookin’ at a preview. See, we want a cold reaction. We’d send the print down there to the exhibitor, and he’s goin’ to have two shows that night, [so] he runs the picture twice. And he advertises a Keaton picture—that’s all. So we’re in there to get…a normal reaction.”
According to Variety, the first preview of Sherlock Jr. took place at a theater in Long Beach. “There,” said the trade, “Keaton took in all the comment he heard among the audience and decided that the picture would not do. He tore it apart and started remaking it.”
For Keaton, this wasn’t as extraordinary as the paper made it sound. “We have never made a picture—I know I never did, and I know Lloyd never did, and I’m sure Chaplin never did—that we didn’t go back and set the camera up again. Because we helped the highspots, and redid the bad ones, and cut footage out, and [got] scenes that would connect things up for us. We always put a makeup on and set the camera back up after that first preview. And generally after the second one, also…”
On March 4, The Film Daily carried an item announcing the completion of Sherlock Jr., and a second preview was held in Glendale. “Again Buster was not satisfied with the picture,” Variety reported. “Another retake was made….” Keaton blew past Metro’s March 10 release date, and a Viola Dana picture titled Don’t Doubt Your Husband was moved up to fill the hole. For its final preview, Sherlock Jr. was brought to a Los Angeles house for a midnight screening. “Keaton and his staff were on hand. The picture looked good to them, the audience laughed heartily. So Buster took it back to the studio, cut it considerably, and then scheduled it for release.”
In all, Keaton’s trims shortened the feature to just 4,065 feet—scarcely a five-reeler—from the sixty thousand feet exposed, a shooting ratio of nearly fifteen to one. Not that he was counting the amount of raw stock he used. “We never paid the slightest attention to it. But we could generally tell when we were over footage, which we didn’t mind, because it was much better to be able to cut and throw things away than to go short.” Now more concept than story, Sherlock Jr. took on the look and feel of a two-reel comedy, a magician’s toolbox of a film. As with Our Hospitality, reactions to the picture were largely positive. Released on April 21, 1924, Sherlock Jr. quickly made its way to major cities, particularly Los Angeles and New York, where the dailies and trades embraced it warmly. At Loew’s State, where the picture opened on April 26, it played to more than twenty-five thousand people in three days, just short of a house record. In New York, the Film Daily branded it “The best comedy this year. A riot of laughs. Probably the best thing Keaton has ever done.” Even Billboard agreed, ranking the Keaton two-reelers among the funniest short comedies ever made. “Sherlock Jr., which is slightly over 4,000 feet long, is funnier than any two-reel comedies Keaton ever made. It is packed with laughable incidents, silly, ridiculous tricks that will cause roars of real belly laughs, and will send them home just a bit ashamed at having laughed so much, just as it did this reviewer—and in a cold projection room, too.”
At the other end of the scale, Variety’s Fred Schader stood nearly alone in declaring Sherlock Jr. “about as unfunny as a hospital operating room.” The Daily News, the World, and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle pretty much concurred, while all the other big papers endorsed it heartily. And while Schader sourly predicted economic doom at Broadway’s Rialto, the picture actually performed quite well with an estimated gross of $21,000 for the week. The one thing almost universally commented upon was the film’s length, which became a particular problem for rural exhibitors, whose audiences expected a full program of entertainment. “A good comedy drama but far from a special,” reported a manager from Rossiter, Pennsylvania. “Too short for a feature.” The film would accumulate worldwide rentals of $448,337, placing it on a par with Three Ages but far behind Our Hospitality. Its reputation would continue to grow over the ensuing decades, however, and in 1991, sixty-seven years after its making, Sherlock Jr. would become the second of Keaton’s features to be enshrined for preservation in the National Film Registry.
“It had always occurred to me that there was a good deal of comedy to be found under the sea,” Keaton wrote in 1926, “and I ordered a regulation diving suit that weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. The only variation was that more glass was put into the front of the helmet. The face, even though it is not a smiling one, must be seen in comedy. That was the beginning of The Navigator. The story was built up from that diver’s suit.”
A character under the sea in a diver’s suit must be tethered to a ship of some kind—not just a thirty-five-footer, but something of size—and Keaton credited Jean Havez with the idea of making it an ocean liner.
“Well, we went to work right then and there and sez, ‘Now, what can we do with an ocean liner?’ [Someone] says, ‘Well, we can make a dead ship out of it. No lights aboard. No running water. Just afloat.’ How could we get it afloat? Well, we set out to figure out how to do that and how to write a story around it. Only to get a boy and a girl alone and adrift in the Pacific Ocean.” It was a natural, a real pip of a story. “Now you go back to your first part to establish your characters. Well, if I was a laborer or a poor guy, or something like that, it would be no hardship for me to be on that ocean liner. But if I started out with a Rolls-Royce, a chauffeur, a footman, a valet, and a couple of cooks and [everyone] else to wait on me—and the same thing with the girl—in other words, the audience knows we were born rich and never had to lift a finger to do anything. Now you turn those two people adrift on a dead ship, they’re helpless.”
Getting the characters stranded on the ship together took some doing, and the setup, as usual for a Keaton picture, wasn’t meant to be funny. Buster is Rollo Treadway, heir to the Treadway fortune—living proof that “every family tree must have its sap.” Rollo’s girl (Kathryn McGuire again) rejects him after he’s already purchased two tickets to Honolulu for the honeymoon. “So I tear up one ticket, put the other in my pocket, and I sez, ‘What time does it sail?’ [My butler] says, ‘Nine o’clock.’ I sez, ‘In the morning?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I sez, ‘It’s too early, so I’ll go aboard tonight.’
“All right. Now we went to the night shot, and we show the night watchman coming out with his punch clock. And I was supposed to go to Pier 2, and we see this watchman come up to punch at this pier. He slid the gate over on 12, but the gate hid the ‘1.’ And I see it from the car and I decide that’s the ship. And I go out there and get on this ship. Oh, and here’s your plot: We went to a bunch of men in a building overlooking the bay of San Francisco and looking down at the boat at the pier. [One of them] says, ‘That boat has just been bought by our enemies, this country that we’re on the verge of going to war against. That ship will carry ammunition and supplies. It’s up to us to see that she doesn’t get there. Tonight, we’ll go down there, we’ll overcome the night watchman, or anybody else who gets in our way, throw her ropes off or cut them off, set that boat adrift—the wind and tide will do the rest. It’s a cinch to go up against those rocks on the other side of the Golden Gate, and it’s a doomed ship.’ That’s the plot.
“So I come down and I get on this boat. Now, there’s nobody to meet me. There’s no lights. It’s a dead ship. There’s no water, there’s no nothing running. But I finally find my stateroom, and when I get inside I have to light matches to see what I’m doing, but I put myself to bed. About this time, these foreign agents arrive and overpower the watchman, put him in a little room, one of the pier sheds. And they go out to set this boat free. And they no more complete their job—they ignore the gangplank that goes onto the ship—but you could see that the ship is going away from the pier and that gangplank is just sliding.
“The girl and her father [are] all dressed up to go to a dinner party someplace, and she brings the car to a stop—she’s driving a coupe—and he says, ‘I had to have you drive me down past the Navigator because I left some papers in the pilot house that I want. I’ll only be a few minutes.’ He comes down onto this pier and he runs into these agents. Well, they grab him, but before they can put a handkerchief in his mouth, he yells, ‘Help!’ She hears it in the car. Well, they drag him into this little shed to bind him up. She doesn’t know that, but passes on down and goes over the gangplank onto the ship. And she no more gets onto the ship when the ship is far enough away from the dock now that the gangplank falls. So she’s on the ship. And it fades out.”
Since The Navigator was essentially a drama made comical by the natures of its two characters, Keaton figured he needed a director who was well versed in the staging of serious pictures. Somebody suggested actor Donald Crisp, who had directed more than thirty movies and had just recently made an African adventure called Ponjola with Anna Q. Nilsson. “I said, ‘I’ve got a couple of dramatic sequences in this thing, and…I want ’em straight. And I’m going to a cannibal island, and I don’t want burlesque-looking headhunters and cannibals out there. I want them legitimate.’ ” Crisp agreed to the assignment, acknowledging it would be “an experience.” He was announced as director of The Navigator in February 1924, while Sherlock Jr. was still in production.
Once Keaton and his crew knew they needed an ocean liner for the story, it fell to Gabe Gabourie to hunt one up. According to Keaton, it was Gabourie who located a former army transport docked in San Francisco called the Buford. Under the flag of the Alaska-Siberian Navigation Co., the 370-foot steamer had been converted to a passenger ship for runs to Seattle and the Arctic. On April 17, it returned to port after a sixty-day tour of the South Seas and was due to be overhauled and returned to Arctic service. Keaton traveled north with Gabourie, Crisp, Havez, Joe Mitchell, and Clyde Bruckman, all intent upon giving the vessel a thorough stem-to-stern inspection. “For two whole days the gagmen shot possibilities at each other and at Buster while they built up his story,” an article in the Los Angeles Times recounted. “A stenographer sat hard by taking down the suggestions. Capt. John A. O’Brien, veteran of fifty-eight years of service on the Pacific, materially aided the scenarists. O’Brien told funny stories of past experiences he had had or of which he had heard, and called in his crew to tell their versions of funny incidents of life on shipboard. At the end of a week of this sort of thing, the stenographer had more than four-hundred pages of single-spaced gag ideas. These ideas were whipped into story form by Buster and his henchmen in several more days of work.”
E. B. White, then a Seattle-based reporter, had taken the SS Buford to Alaska in 1923 and thought her “a fine little ship…She was deep, not overburdened with superstructure, and had a wide, clear main deck.” Suitable for filming, the Buford was chartered by Buster Keaton Productions for a period of ten weeks at a cost of $25,000. By April 30, it was en route to Redondo Beach, where it would be temporarily outfitted for The Navigator. Upon arrival, it was given some cosmetic touch-ups and two portable truck-mounted generators were taken aboard, as were 100,000 feet of raw film stock. One of the staterooms was turned into a cutting room, and the ship’s skeleton crew was augmented with thirty production personnel, including Gabourie, electrician Denver Harmon, and cameramen Elgin Lessley and Byron Houck. Within a week, they were anchored off Catalina Island, filming the early scenes of Rollo and the girl aboard the deserted ship.
Donald Crisp directs a scene from The Navigator (1924). Kathryn McGuire can be seen over Keaton’s shoulder.
Donald Crisp was on the picture nearly three months before filming commenced, and despite Keaton’s assertions to the contrary, there exists a thirty-page treatment for The Navigator that was likely prepared at Crisp’s behest. While in San Francisco, Crisp and Keaton shot Rollo’s introduction as laid forth in the document, which was staged on a street in the city’s affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood: “The opening gag in that picture with me is one of the most stolen gags that was ever done on the screen,” Keaton said. “I think I knew at one time of twenty-seven times it had been done by other companies. With us, the gag was more to establish the fact that I was so helpless, that I went to call on the girl, and I came down and got in my car with a chauffeur and a footman. The footman wrapped a blanket around my knees—a big open Pierce-Arrow phaeton—and drove across the street. That’s all. I got out to call on the girl. I asked the girl if she’d marry me and she said, ‘No,’ and I came back down [to the car]. The guy opened the door in the car for me and I said, ‘No, I think the walk will do me good.’ So I walked across the street with the car followin’ me, makin’ a U-turn.”
Crisp managed the scene beautifully, but now in the waters off Catalina, Keaton came to the realization he had made a mistake: “I said to him, ‘You don’t have to worry about the gag department. We’ll take care of that.’ Well, we start and he directed all right, but he wasn’t fussy about it. He was only interested in the scenes I was in. He turned gagman overnight on me. He came to work every morning with the goddamnedst gags you ever heard of in your life. Wild! We didn’t want him as a gagman, for God’s sake!” Crisp, he found, had actually bungled some of the serious stuff, permitting the heavies to overact and attempting comedic touches where there weren’t supposed to be any. “Nothing to do about it,” said Buster. “We carried him through the picture.”
Most of the shipboard action was worked out by Keaton himself, particularly a sequence in which Rollo and the girl engage in a series of near misses. Moving around the ship, they can hear footsteps but can’t quite catch sight of each other as they climb stairways and walk the various decks and passageways, going increasingly faster all the while. “Then,” as James Agee was later to observe, “the camera withdraws to a point of vantage at the stern, leans its chin in its hand and just watches the whole intricate superstructure of the ship as the protagonists stroll, steal, and scuttle from level to level, up, down, and sidewise, always managing to miss each other by hair’s-breadths, in an enchantingly neat and elaborate piece of timing. There are no subsidiary gags to get laughs in this sequence and there is little loud laughter; merely a quiet and steadily increasing kind of delight.”
As Keaton explained, “We set the camera out on the bow of the ship so it could take in the three decks, and just sit down and talk it over with the girl—tell her how fast to travel, where to look, how to come down stairs and look, go back up, and so forth until we laid out the chase, and then we go ahead and shoot it.” There was also an arresting visual in which all the cabin doors were rigged to open and close to the pitch and roll of the ship. “We got a camera with a big weight hanging on there, and we went down underneath [it] with a piece of chalk and marked a figure 8 [on the deck]. Now, this is a free head—a ball head—on the camera. Now this man here just takes this [weighted ball head], and when the scene starts he just follows that [figure 8]. That way you’ve [got] your [movement].”
In time, Rollo and the girl adapt to their surroundings, making sleeping quarters of the ship’s furnaces and improvising an automated galley of pull cords and counterweights. After weeks on the water, land is sighted. Peering through binoculars, they realize they’re drifting toward a village of cannibals. “We’re safer on the boat,” Rollo tells her, but then the stern of the Navigator runs aground and they find themselves under attack. Donald Crisp proved helpful in staging these scenes, and took an active role in casting the natives, including the pioneering actor and production executive Noble Johnson. The siege constitutes the entire third act of the film, with the pair fighting off the invaders with everything at their disposal—fireworks, sky rockets, buckets of water, even a miniature cannon that trails Rollo like a tiny attack dog.
“In that particular period of the 1920s,” Clyde Bruckman commented, “we were trying to shake the pattern of the final chase. A hard thing to do, it was set in the public mind. ‘The chase,’ Buster was always saying, ‘is just one form of climax. 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 we didn’t have another liner to chase the one we had. We had to try to come up with another climax.”
In July, The Navigator company was reported filming in Mexican waters. “We moved our generators and lighting equipment on, and put cooks and assistants on there, and we lived on that boat for a month and shot all around it. We could take it anyplace and drop anchor, or have her out at open sea, or anything we wanted to do.” When they returned to Los Angeles, Donald Crisp was unceremoniously let go.
“Toward the end,” Variety reported, “Keaton decided to handle the megaphone himself and Crisp sat on the sidelines. One day, Keaton informed Crisp that the picture was completed and the latter left the lot. Subsequently, Keaton, it is said, shot the underwater scenes, which, it is claimed, Crisp had never been in favor of doing.” Keaton, more to the point, saw no advantage in keeping Crisp on the payroll: “A director can’t do anything with an underwater sequence anyway. It’s just between me and the cameraman and the technical man.”
Originally, the plan had been different. Anchored off Catalina, Keaton anticipated they’d shoot the underwater scenes at the same time as everything else. “But we found that when one walked on the bottom of the Pacific in a diver’s suit, he stirred up so much sand that the films became cloudy and indistinct. It was necessary to have clear water into which we could lower our diving bell that contained the cameras.” Once back on dry land, Keaton thought they could use the Elliotta Plunge in Riverside, where an enclosed pool, forty by sixty, was continuously fed by natural hot springs, and where his old friend Houdini had shot an underwater sequence for a picture called Terror Island. But the pool wasn’t deep enough to accommodate the mock-up of the ship’s propeller and rudder assembly that Rollo goes down to repair, so it was necessary to add another ten feet to the sides. “Well, we thought that would work out fine because we know the clear water we’re goin’ to get down there. But the base of the swimming pool is built to only hold seven or eight feet of water. Wouldn’t take eighteen. The bottom just went out from under it. The weight of the water pushed the bottom out. So we wrecked that pool. Had to build them a new swimmin’ pool.”
They finally settled on Lake Tahoe, up near Truckee, where the water was clear but cold and Keaton found he could stay under for only thirty minutes at a time. Stationed in the vicinity of Meek’s Bay, the location resembled a marionette theater in which Keaton performed in twenty feet of water while the crew up above manipulated scores of artificial sea creatures. Work went slowly because he could only communicate through a series of clumsy hand signals, the cameramen encased in a stationary diving bell. Several solid gags had been devised, such as when Rollo commandeers a passing swordfish and uses it to fight off another. “Then I started fixing the leak, but a school of fish came by, all going in the same direction except one poor little fish who tried and tried to cross their track and couldn’t. I, seeing its plight, picked up a starfish, put it on my chest, whistled, and held up my hand at the school of fish. They stopped, I motioned the little fish to cross, he swam by, then I turned and signaled the school to pass on. They all went by, and I returned to the leak.”
Having once estimated that the gag cost over ten thousand dollars to rig up and shoot, Keaton told how it was accomplished in a 1958 interview: “It was perfect. And it was a son-of-a-gun to do. It took us three days to get the gag. We had somethin’ like twelve-hundred rubber fish, all around ten inches long—and they had to be solid rubber so they wouldn’t float—and hang ’em all with violin string, catgut. And a piece of apparatus built by the Llewellyn Iron Company, and sink four telegraph poles under water up there to operate this apparatus overhead, to control the school of fish. But the gag photographed perfect.”
After a week or so at Lake Tahoe, The Navigator returned to Hollywood and wrapped in mid-August at a reported cost of $385,000. And because so much of the picture was assembled aboard the Buford, it had already been previewed when Variety took note on August 28. “The two fish gags,” said Keaton, “were perfect—looked real as the deuce—sure for a laugh. We previewed the film at a small movie theater in Hollywood. It went over with a bang—all except that gag about the school of fish! The swordfish gag got a laugh, but not the other one, which we thought was so great. We were at a loss to account for it, for it seemed to us to be funnier than anything else in the picture.”
A cold audience wasn’t the problem; they were well into the picture by then and loved everything else about it. Moreover, a moment or two later, Rollo stooped over and washed some muck off his hands in a bucket left at the bottom of the ocean, and they laughed at that. “We didn’t trust that preview. [I said], ‘We’ll keep it in for a second [preview]. Somethin’s wrong.’ We kept it in for a second. And the same thing.” They even tried it a third time, but it was just no good. “Could it be that the gag was too tricky—that the audience tried to figure out how it was done? Because as soon as an audience gets interested in technicalities, your laugh is dead. We decided it couldn’t be that, because the swordfish gag, which looked much trickier, had got a big laugh. But why should they laugh at that and not at the other? At last we struck what we thought must be the reason. We figured it out this way: I had gone down to fix the leak in order to save the girl and get away. The swordfish gag was legitimate because I was protecting myself against them. But there was no excuse for my stopping my work on the leak to go and help the little fish. It was simply illogical, and the public wouldn’t have it. So we kissed that gag a sad good-bye.”
The original preview version of The Navigator reportedly contained about a thousand feet of underwater action, which was sluggish by its very nature, but trims left only about five hundred feet remaining in the final release cut. The Film Daily was the first trade to review the picture, its notice appearing in its issue of September 7. “While The Navigator isn’t as hilarious a comedy number as Keaton’s last, Sherlock Jr., it is consistently good comedy and should satisfy those who enjoy a good laugh…probably the best bit of the picture is the underwater episode in which Keaton goes down in a diving suit.”
A week later, Moving Picture World agreed: “Probably it wouldn’t be correct to call this Buster’s best picture, but certainly it ranks high among his efforts.” Ahead of release, The Navigator opened locally at Loew’s State, where it beat every other bill in town with a gross of nearly $26,000 for the week, shattering the house record for a Sunday and topping the attendance mark set by Sherlock Jr. by more than nineteen hundred admissions.
Officially released on October 13, 1924, The Navigator opened on Broadway at the Capitol Theatre, which had just recently come under the control of Loew’s Incorporated. On Sunday, October 12, the crowds were, in the words of Variety’s Sid Silverman, “jammed to the doors” and a record $14,797 flowed into the till. The picture played S.R.O. on Columbus Day as well, delivering a solid $13,185. Powered by great reviews in the New York dailies, the first week total of $60,700 was just shy of a house record, and the decision was quickly made to hold it a second week—a first in New York for a Keaton feature. Similar sales were registered at San Francisco’s Warfield, where the film equaled a house record, and at the Stanley Theatre in Philadelphia, where it was held for an extended run. Worldwide rentals would eventually stand at $680,406, making it the most commercially successful of Keaton’s features to date.
“The laurels are again going to the comedians,” editorialized Edwin Schallert in the Los Angeles Times, “and this time it appears as if Buster Keaton were the special victor. His picture The Navigator did an astonishing business on the showing in the East and is also rambling into quite a run here. The film is easily one of the most effective in fun that Keaton has yet made, and from all indications it has determined his future as a star in five-reelers. There is a much more human note in the production than many of the others in which he has appeared, and one does not feel the creak of so much machinery as is used to put over some of his productions.”
Harry Langdon, Schallert noted, would soon be moving into features, Harold Lloyd was scaling new heights of popularity with Girl Shy and Hot Water, and carefree Douglas MacLean’s light comedies possessed “their own particular spice of humor.”
Meanwhile, over on Lillian Way, Keaton was immersed in the making of his next feature comedy, an intriguing prospect in that it was to be made, it had been announced, entirely in Technicolor.