Customer Reviews

The Navigator (with The Boat & The Love Nest) [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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THE NAVAGATOR is one of Buster's great ones. A classic. The majority of the movie is on the boat "The Navigator". Many very funny moments and great stunts. Buster plays the spoiled rich guy who ends up as the hero saving the girl. The scene where Buster and the girl run around attempting to find each other is a classic. Ditto for Buster playing cards with a soaked deck. Many more great moments.

THE BOAT is one of Buster's best shorts. Buster, his wife and two small sons launch a boat. There are many very funny moments and great stunt work.

THE LOVE NEST is also outstanding. Most of the movie involves Buster and Big Joe Roberts on Joe's boat during Buster's dream. This was Buster's last silent short.

Of all the Buster Keaton videos I've seen so far I think this was the best!!
It was just too funny. There was hardy a moment I wasen't laughing. One of my favorite parts was where Buster and the girl he's with are trying to find a safe place to sleep.
It's the kind of movie you have to see for you self: words can't discribe it exeped for, great and funny. and even those aren't enough. It was that good.

"The Navigator" (1924) was a critical and commercial triumph that helped establish Buster Keaton's place in the pantheon of silent-film comedians. Like many Keaton features, "The Navigator" showcases his mastery of props and characterization. In this instance, the expensive "prop" is an abandoned ship. As pampered millionaire Rollo Treadway, the Keaton persona falls into place: a youthful novice who proves his mettle when relying on his own devices. Though Donald Crisp received director credit, Buster actually did most of the work - displaying expert command of the cinematic medium. An ideal introduction to Keaton's timeless art.

For many years The Navigator had a reputation as one of Keaton's greatest comedies-- partly because during the 30s and 40s it was the only one available, from the Museum of Modern Art. Today it ranks a notch lower-- like a lot of his middle period films, it doesn't have the distinctive strangeness of, say, Sherlock Jr. All the same, the story of a helpless rich boy and girl trapped alone on a drifting ocean liner shows Keaton's mastery of oversized props and single comic situations. Tape includes two other nautically themed shorts, The Love Nest and the superb The Boat, which features the famous image of a fatalistic Buster going under with his boat, only his porkpie hat left on the water's surface.

When one considers how repetitive and uninspired most artistic productions, indeed, most of life, are, Buster Keaton remains an uniquely satisfying talent nearly a century past his heyday, even when you have seen many things somewhat similar to his films, or have a pretty good idea of what is coming.

I did not enjoy The Navigator as much as I did College, the other other Keaton movie I have seen to date. This may be due to a general personal terror of boats and water, which make the comic possibilities of drowning or being adrift at sea strike me more darkly than perhaps they do other people. The film starts off with two very good jokes, and I was anticipating that it was going to be perhaps in a special category of greatness even among the acknowledged great. And it is good, but the various gags on the ship, while often ingenious, don't always strike me as being as funny as other situations do.

I have to admit I am at this point more of a Chaplin than a Keaton fan--these two camps seem to form one of those strange divisions of life across sections of which there is little commonality or fraternization. Chaplin to me is the fuller human, and brings more of what it is really like to be a person into his movies. Keaton may better represent some more particular strain of modernity though.

Regarding the two shorts on the tape, The Boat is about a family whose boat springs a leak in the middle of the night during a tempest and is actually kind of scary, though it does star the lovely Sybil Seely. The Love Nest is set on board a cargo ship ruled by a tyrannical captain; there is some good humor in it.