Buster Keaton is feeling depressed after his fiancé breaks off their engagement. In order to clear his mind, and escape from his life and his lost love, this heartbroken swain swears off women forever, and sets off on his small boat, Cupid, and takes to the sea to sail around the world on a trip to cure his soul and forget his troubles.
After weeks at sea he gets picked up by a whaling ship, The Love Nest, with a cruel captain (Joe Roberts). The whaler's merciless captain throws crew members who displease him overboard, for even the slightest offense. He keeps a list of names on the wall and crosses people off it after he has thrown them into the sea to die. He is not completely cold, he does toss a wreath in after the guy. He keeps a pile of them on deck.
After his steward accidentally pours hot tea over the captain's hand, the captain tosses him overboard and replaces him with heartbroken Keaton. Throughout a series of antics, mishaps, and some amusing confrontations, Keaton manages to get into unimaginable amounts of trouble while trying to avoid the fate of other crewmen, as the captain's next victim, ending in a climactic, heavily resonant, chase through the labyrinthine ship.
A 1923 American black & white silent short comedy silent film written and directed by and starring Buster Keaton. All of the names listed on the clipboard as the ship's crew were contemporary comedians/actors.
This short comedy, less polished than Keaton's best features, was his final silent short film. Keaton would, however, return to the two-reeler format in the 1930s after his career had fallen on hard times. He would remake many of his silent shorts, unsuccessfully, as talkies.
Keaton was known as the "great stone face". He never expressed much emotion as things happened to him. Whether it was a surly captain or a broken heart, Keaton remained emotionally steady. Where he excelled was in the antics and pacing of how often he could throw a gimmick at the audience. Watch how he uses his tears to seal the envelope in which he sends his farewell letter to his fiancée before setting off to sail around the world on his titular boat. The drawn-on beard he sports after several weeks at sea is amusing. An understated title card reads, “The captain is rather irritable.” There are a few clever sight gags like when Buster sits looking forlornly out of a porthole which turns out to be a picture hanging on the ship’s wall. When a whale is spotted off the port bow Buster, in his confusion, brings the captain a bottle of port. And in a crisis the Captain tells Keaton, "You know what to do" and Buster goes and fetches the whiskey bottle. Another notable gag is Keaton "fishing". He walks down a rope ladder into the water with a gun until he is completely submerged. There is a puff of smoke from below the surface and then he returns up the ladder holding a fish!
The story of how Joseph "Buster" Keaton got into moving pictures is worth repeating. Born into "The Three Keatons," his parents' vaudeville act, where, as a toddler, he earned his nickname for his ability to painlessly take a pratfall, Buster left the family trade in 1917, at 21, and set off for New York City to make it on his own. He quickly fell in with outsized silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, a fan of the Three Keatons, who was shooting "The Butcher Boy" (1917) at the time. Visiting the set with an old family friend, Buster was unexpectedly invited to perform in a few scenes with Arbuckle and made his spur-of-the-moment film debut with a bit about a spilled bucketful of molasses. After wrapping for the day, Buster asked Arbuckle if he could borrow one of the movie cameras to get a feel for how it worked. At home, he disassembled it and put it back together, and when he showed up the next morning to give it back, he took a job as a gag man and actor for producer Joe Schenk and Arbuckle's "Comique" comedy troupe. This was the beginning of a three-year apprenticeship that gave Keaton ample opportunity to learn the ins and outs of working in front of and behind the camera. Impressed by his work, Schenk gave Keaton his own production unit, and between 1920 and 1923, Buster made 19 two-reel shorts, experiments in comedic tone that found the newly established actor/director discovering his own brand of sophisticated slapstick.
A fun Buster Keaton short. Far from Keaton's greatest work, there's nothing unique here. This flimsy story doesn't have much in the way of plot, it's just a framework to hang on a lot of sight gags, it still packs plenty of laugh-out-loud comedy. Aside from—once again—a perfect ending, this last two-reeler is the least memorable of the 19 he made rapidly between 1920 and 1923, but you can hardly blame Keaton for wanting to finish with shorts and get started on his first feature, as fellow silent comics Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd had already beaten him to the punch. It wouldn't take him long to catch up. This one is for Keaton completists only.
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