Buster Keaton never needed anything more than a simple outline to make his typically graceful, inventive comedies, and the entire plot of one of his best remembered features can easily be summed up in less than twenty words: a spoiled young millionaire and his reluctant fiancé find themselves adrift alone on an empty ocean liner.
It takes a little effort to get the couple aboard (with help from a group of histrionic saboteurs) but, once at sea, the minimal scenario allowed Keaton plenty of room to exercise his unique comic genius, with gags ranging from the intimate (battling a recalcitrant deck chair; shuffling a soggy pack of cards) to the sublime (Buster, in a leaking rowboat, attempting to tow the huge drifting liner). As usual, fate and circumstance (and, in this case, a tribe of hungry cannibals) all play a part in Buster's rite of passage from bumbling naïf to competent hero, and (also, as usual) the transformation is often as astonishing as it is sidesplitting.
It takes a little effort to get the couple aboard (with help from a group of histrionic saboteurs) but, once at sea, the minimal scenario allowed Keaton plenty of room to exercise his unique comic genius, with gags ranging from the intimate (battling a recalcitrant deck chair; shuffling a soggy pack of cards) to the sublime (Buster, in a leaking rowboat, attempting to tow the huge drifting liner). As usual, fate and circumstance (and, in this case, a tribe of hungry cannibals) all play a part in Buster's rite of passage from bumbling naïf to competent hero, and (also, as usual) the transformation is often as astonishing as it is sidesplitting.