Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
The Navigator
A millionaire who has never boiled an egg and the girl who turned him down drift out to sea alone on an empty liner.
Rollo Treadway proposes, is refused, and boards the wrong ship; so does she. The Navigator has been cut adrift by spies, and the only two people aboard a liner built for hundreds are a pair who have always had servants. Keaton plays the first half as housekeeping in a galley scaled for a crew, where four eggs disappear into a cauldron. Then the ship runs aground off a cannibal island and he goes over the side in a diving suit. Watch the night they learn they are not alone: the two of them hunt each other round the decks, always a stairway apart, while the camera holds still and lets the ship do the timing.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Buster Keaton · Donald Crisp
- Photographed by
- Elgin Lessley
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Keaton's two pictures of 1924, months apart, both about a man swallowed by a machine too big for him: a cinema screen, then an ocean liner. Watch how calmly he lives inside each.