THU, DEC 06, 8pm:
The MBC Great Directors Series
Retrospective & Exhibition
The Free and Easy, Electric,
Frozen, Paleface, Saphead, Baloonatic:
BUSTER KEATON
in
THE NAVIGATOR
With customized electronic score
designed and performed LIVE by
Directed by BUSTER KEATON & DONALD CRISP/1924/60mins.
With Buster Keaton, Katherine McGuire, Frederick Vroom
A precursor to his classic The General - only centered around a 500-foot steamship rather than a Civil War locomotive – The Navigator demonstrates Buster Keaton's ability to transform complex machinery into large-scale comedy props. In a return to the "pampered youth" role he had played in The Saphead and Battling Butler, Keaton stars as Rollo Treadway, an inexperienced lad of extraordinary wealth (and surprisingly little common sense) who finds himself adrift on the Navigator with no one else on board excerpt an equally naive girl. After discovering each other's presence in an ingenious ballet of unintentional hide-and-seek, the couple resourcefully fashion a home for themselves aboard the derelict boat, in spite of their unfamiliarity with the tools of domesticity. A series of mis-adventures ensue: on the high seas, on the ocean floor, and in the face of a fleet of angry head-hunters.
“Keaton is the great metaphysical existentialist: a modernist in the finest sense of the word.”-Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central
