Trailer
Plot summary
Rollo Treadway is wealthy and impulsive. He asks his neighbor Betsy O'Brien to marry him and has a servant book passage for a honeymoon cruise to Honolulu. Betsy turns him down, but Rollo takes the trip alone and goes aboard that night; the pier number is partly hidden, so he ends up on the wrong vessel. That ship, the Navigator, belongs to Betsy's father, John O'Brien, who has just sold it to a small nation at war. Saboteurs for the rival side turn it loose, and he is seized and bound on shore when he comes to check on it. Betsy hears his cry, steps aboard to search for him, and the ship is cut free. It drifts into the Pacific, neither of the two aboard knowing the other is there.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Navigator (1924)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Prior to The Navigator, the Buford's most controversial service had come in 1919-20, during the First Red Scare, when it was used as the "Soviet Ark" to deport 249 "undesirables" from the United States to revolutionary Russia, among them the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
- Keaton began shooting the underwater scenes in the Riverside municipal pool, whose concrete walls had to be extended to 20 feet, but the extra weight caused the bottom to cave in, so he moved production to Lake Tahoe, where he and his cameraman drank bourbon to cope with the cold.
- Keaton initially hired Donald Crisp to direct the dramatic scenes so he could concentrate on the comedy, but Crisp was uninterested in drama and "turned gagman overnight on me", so Keaton told him the shooting was over just as an excuse to get rid of him.
