The Navigator (1924)

There's a particular kind of respect that sits just shy of affection, and that's roughly where I land with The Navigator. I can see what Buster Keaton is doing. I can see how brilliantly he's doing it. I just don't always feel it.

The premise is a good one: Keaton and Kathryn McGuire, two thoroughly useless rich kids, find themselves the sole occupants of a massive, drifting ocean liner. Nobody else aboard. No one to help. Just this enormous, indifferent vessel and two people completely unequipped to deal with it. The comedy, in theory, writes itself. And to Keaton's enormous credit, he wrings a genuinely impressive amount of invention out of that setup. The gags involving the ship's scale, two people rattling around a vessel built for hundreds, are well-observed. The machinery doesn't care about them. The sheer size of the thing works against them at every turn. It's a smart comic engine.

And then there's the diving suit sequence. I'll give it this: it's extraordinary. Keaton in a cumbersome underwater suit, still somehow deadpan, still somehow dignified, navigating the chaos beneath the surface with that characteristic stone-faced composure. It's the film's centrepiece and it earns that position. The stunt work and the editing required to pull it off are genuinely impressive, and you can feel the ambition in every frame of it.

But here's where I have to be honest, because this is the sort of film where honesty feels slightly transgressive. Silent cinema asks something of you. It requires a kind of visual literacy and a willingness to meet it on its own terms, to adjust your rhythms to its rhythms. And I find, more often than I'd like to admit, that I struggle to make that crossing. The pantomime acting, however precisely calibrated, creates a distance. I'm watching skilled performers convey emotion and situation through exaggerated physical expression, and part of my brain is always clocking that performance rather than losing itself in it. The century between us doesn't disappear just because the filmmaking is good.

I felt something similar, though not quite as strongly, when I revisited The General. That one gets closer to winning me over fully, partly because the escalating stakes give it more propulsive energy. The Navigator is more episodic, a series of set pieces strung across the ship's geography, and in the stretches between the big moments the pacing does sag. Not fatally. But noticeably.

I want to be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying Keaton isn't a genius. The man clearly was. The control he had over his own body, over space, over comic timing executed entirely through movement and expression, it's remarkable. another Keaton film from the same year shows just as much technical invention, and I'd probably rate that one slightly higher for sheer momentum. With The Navigator, the admiration is genuine, the enjoyment is intermittent.

What it comes down to is this: there's a version of watching this film where you're a film historian, or someone who grew up steeped in silent comedy, and it probably lands differently. The gags probably land harder, the rhythms feel natural, the visual language is fluent rather than learned. For that viewer, this is essential Keaton, maybe even peak Keaton. The production scale is remarkable for its era, the stunts are audacious, and the whole enterprise has a confident, unhurried craft to it.

For the rest of us, though, it's a respectful nod to a master working at a high level in a medium that's drifted a long way from where most of us live now. You come away impressed. You come away admiring. You just don't always come away laughing.

Two and a half stars.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1924  | Watched: 2026-03-27

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Buster Keaton: The General (1926) · Our Hospitality (1923) · Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) · Sherlock Jr. (1924)
More with Buster Keaton: The General (1926) · Our Hospitality (1923) · Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) · Sherlock Jr. (1924)
More from the 1920s: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928) · A Throw of Dice (1929)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)