Dandy navigateur looks like a comedy with a big budget, with expensive production values. It compares well with US productions, while many European comedies from around 1920 look decidedly cheap. Most of the action is set on a ship crossing the Atlantic and the entertaining plot is about a couple in love tangled in misunderstandings. The star of this stunning French comedy deserves a proper introduction. Raymond Dandy was born Ramond Frau in 1887 in Senegal to an Italian father and a French mother. He grew up in Tunisia and Marseilles before moving to Paris as a teenager, where he started his artistic career in a circus. After spending 1912-1916 in Rome where he made almost 150 films as Kri Kri for Cines in the golden age of European comic shorts, he headed back to Paris. Here he created in 1919-1920 a series of comedies for Éclair, now using his stage name Dandy. In 1921 he moved to Vienna, where he would make five comic films in 1923. Back in France, Raymond Dandy worked as a comedian for the Moulin Rouge and later for the Folies Bergère.

                                                                                                                                                                            Karl Wratschko

Dandy goes to the pharmacy for medicine for his wife Lulu. The assistant is writing a love letter to the boss’s daughter, proposing that they elope on the next transatlantic ship. The letter of course ends up with Lulu’s medicine. Furious, Lulu embarks on the Pacific, with the firm intention of fetching her husband. Dandy reacts as his wife did, and tries to catch up with the packet-boat by aeroplane. After a forced landing and a brief stay on an island inhabited by nymphs, Dandy succeeds in catching up with the ship. The maze of bridges and cabins becomes the theatre for misunderstandings and epic pursuits….

Eric Le Roy