The Boat (1921) on Netflix
Buster builds a boat, the Damfino, inside his house, but it is too big for the door. He tows it out with his car and takes his family to sea.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.1/103,975 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
Buster has spent his time building a large boat, the Damfino, inside his own home, and he christens it there. When he is ready to take it out, the boat turns out to be wider than the doorway, so he widens the opening and hitches the hull to his car with a pulley line. The tow brings the house down. At the water the family loses the car, and the boat's folding funnels, mast and rigging let it slip under the low bridges of the Venice canals. Once at sea, Buster, his wife and their two children run into a storm.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Boat (1921)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The shot of the boat sliding down the ramp and sinking took three days to film. Technical director Fred Gabourie had two 35-foot boats built, one to float and one to sink, and neither worked: the sinker, loaded with about 1600 lb of pig iron and T-rails, simply slowed down on the water.
- Only a tugboat finally sank the boat on camera. The crew towed it to Balboa Bay off Newport Beach, dropped an anchor with a cable running to a pulley on the stern, and had the tug haul the other end so the vessel was dragged under.
- According to Okkonen and Pesch, Buster Keaton took the boat's name, Damfino, from a powerboat entered in an Actors' Colony regatta in Muskegon, Michigan. He used it again for a racing shell in College in 1927, and members of the International Buster Keaton Society still call themselves The Damfinos.
- Virginia Fox was originally cast as the wife and was replaced by Sybil Seely, who had played the wife in One Week, because Keaton was thinking of joining the two shorts into a single four-reel story about one young couple. He never made that combined film.
