A young millionaire and the young millionairess he hopes to marry find themselves passengers on an empty ocean liner--a dead ship, adrift in the middle of the Atlantic. Two more useless characters there never were, and now they are faced with the reverse-Robinson Crusoe challenge of setting up housekeeping in the over-technical environment of a ship built for thousands--with not a servant in sight. Part of The Navigator's lasting greatness lies in the depth and grace of Keaton's very modern vision of a man and a woman, “drifting off to nowhere in the dark,” who throw themselves into the world of machines and somehow survive. The film is also a landmark in Keaton's career; David Robinson, writing for Richard Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, notes that The Navigator was Keaton's biggest box office success, and adds: “The Navigator...grew out of a single prop--a great ocean-going liner which (Keaton's) special-effects man, Fred Gabourie, had found about to be scrapped. Keaton devised a plot mechanism that landed a boy and a girl...adrift alone on the ship; he then created a brilliant superstructure of gag inventions upon the simple base situation. Every Keaton film from this period onwards seemed to challenge him to fresh virtuosity. Here it is seen in an underwater sequence--with Keaton instantly recognizable by his every gesture despite the heavy disguise of a complete diver's suit--which took four weeks to shoot and demanded extraordinary ingenuity in the creation of equipment and technique.”