Celebrating the centennial of Buster Keaton’s biggest hits: ‘Sherlock Jr.’ and ‘The Navigator’

Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd were the clown jewels of silent comedy.  Chaplin was off the screen in 1924; he was a year away from the release of one of his feature masterpieces “The Gold Rush.” Lloyd followed the blockbuster success of 1923’s “Safety Last!” in 1924 with the gems “Girl Shy” and “Hot Water.”  And Keaton dazzled critics and audiences with the innovative “Sherlock Jr.” and the riotous “The Navigator.”

“Sherlock Jr.”, which opened in May 1924, was just Keaton’s third feature. Running a brisk 45 minutes, “Sherlock Jr” pushed the cinematic envelope. The stoic, deadpan comic plays a projectionist and janitor at a small-town movie theater who dreams, literally, of becoming a detective. He also discovers that he has a slick rival (Ward Crane) for his sweet girl (Kathryn McGuire). The slick even steals the pocket watch of the girl’s father (Keaton’s dad, Joe) and puts the blame on Buster. Banished from the house, he goes to work only to fall asleep while projecting a movie with a plot strangely like what has just happened. Suddenly, a dream version of Buster leaves the booth and ends up inside the movie, and as ace detective Sherlock Jr., solves the case.

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The New York Times noted in its review the film-within-a-film is “one of the best screen tricks ever incorporated in a comedy-and laughter starts and for the balance of the picture you smile, snigger, chuckle, grin and guffaw.” Renowned critic Pauline Kael would state the screen trick was “a piece of native American surrealism.” And 60 years later, “Sherlock Jr” was one of the inspirations for Woody Allen’s comedy-fantasy “The Purple Rose of Cairo” where a movie character leaves the film he’s appearing in and enters the real world.

“Sherlock Jr.”  is chock full of stunts, including an incredible, breathtaking riderless motorcycle chase. He did get hurt during the sequence when he gets drenched by a waterspout. According to TCM.com, “the force of the water was greater than expected and knocked his head into a rail. He got up and finished the scene but complained of a headache for many days. Many years later, a routine exam with X-rays revealed that he had fractured his neck in the incident.”

In 1991, “Sherlock Jr” was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” And in 2000, AFI ranked it No. 62 in its “AFI 100 Years…100 Laughs.”

The New York Times reported that “mouths were wide open in explosions of laughter and eyes sparked with merriment” at a screening of Keaton’s next film “The Navigator” which opened in the fall that year. The Times continued that the film was an “excellent panacea for melancholia or lethargy” adding it was a “parcel of merriment.”

Rollo Treadway is one of Keaton’s best characterizations: a bored wealthy young man who is waited on hand and foot. One day he decides he should marry; he’s driven across the street to ask neighbor Betsy (Kathryn McGuire) if she’ll marry him that day. She refuses. Because he’d already bought two steamboat tickets to Hawaii, he decides to go by himself. Insisting he board the boat the night before, he gets on the wrong ship-an abandoned vessel called the Navigator. Betsy also ends up on the Navigator while searching for her father who has been kidnapped and held by spies. The two go from spoiled rotten Nepo-babies to self-sufficient individuals who thwart some very hungry cannibals.

“The Navigator” was Keaton’s biggest commercial hit and the comedy was selected by the National Film Registry in 2018. It comes in at No. 81 in the AFI list of “100 Years….100 Laughs.”

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