The Navigator Blu-ray Review
Buster finds a way to go home, by land or sea or foam.
Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, August 22, 2012
In 1924, Buster Keaton needed a hit. His last film,
Sherlock Jr.—now hailed as a surrealist meta-cinema masterpiece—was a critical bomb, too
short at 45 minutes, too cerebral for audiences who just wanted to laugh, and all-around too clever
for its own good. One
Variety writer, not recognizing Buster's ahead-of-his-time genius, even said it was "about as
unfunny as a hospital operating room." Buster and his gag men immediately got busy brainstorming new ideas, but nothing
stuck until Keaton's longtime technical director, Fred Gabourie—while scouting boats for a different project—discovered the
S.S. Buford, a 500-foot decommissioned military passenger liner that had once served in the Spanish American War and later
ferried Russian anarchists and other leftist "undesirables" back to the motherland during the First Red Scare. The ship was set
to be scrapped, but Gabourie arranged to lease it for three months, giving it to Keaton as an enormous floating prop to use
however he pleased. The result was
The Navigator, a slapstick-on-the-high-seas adventure that features some of
Keaton's most memorable gags. It would also become his biggest box-office success, ensuring a lucrative three-year contract
with producer Joe Schenck, placing Buster in the same league as Charlie Chaplin, and preceding the even larger-scaled
vehicular comedy of
The General.
"Our story deals with one of those queer tricks that fate often plays," reads the first intertitle, but before we can get to this
feat of coincidence, the film introduces a bit of stage-setting political intrigue—spies from one unnamed nation have
purchased the steamship The Navigator, and agents from another are intent on setting it adrift during the night unmanned,
hoping it'll dash upon the rocks and sink. Of course, neither party expects Buster to be on board. Keaton plays "Rollo
Treadway, heir to the Treadway fortune," a variation on his naive layabout rich kid character from
The Saphead,
which is referenced here when a title card refers to Rollo as "living proof that every family tree must have its sap."
Looking out the window, bored, Rollo spies a pair of newlyweds and makes the spur-of-the-moment decision that he too
wants to get married
that very day. He has his manservant complete all the necessary arrangements, including
booking passage on an ocean liner for a Honolulu honeymoon, but when Rollo proposes to Betsy (Kathryn McGuire), the girl
next door, she turns him down with a "Certainly not!" But here's where fate comes in. Through a series of comic
miscommunications—and some obscured pier signage—Rollo and Betsy both end up aboard The Navigator right as the spies
cut it loose from its mooring. Initially, neither knows the other is there, and Keaton stages a brilliant chase sequence where
he and his co-star run up and down the decks, narrowly missing one another at every turn.
When they finally find each other—Keaton falls butt-first through a portal and onto a sawhorse where Betsy is sitting—
The
Navigator becomes a winning parody of domesticity, with the two rich youngsters, who've never had to do anything for
themselves, ineptly trying to make a home on the drifting vessel. Their first challenge is what to do for food, and there's a
laugh-out-loud-worthy galley scene where Betsy sets the table with oversized utensils—enormous steak forks and foot-long
knives—and makes coffee using seawater and three un-ground beans. Meanwhile, Rollo tries to open a tin of meat with an
enormous cleaver and has a mishap with a can of condensed milk.
Given that they're on a passenger vessel, you'd think that lodging wouldn't be an issue, but Rollo gets spooked in his bunk by
a swaying portrait of an angry-looking sailor—the ghost-ship vibe is genuinely eerie, with doors that swing open and shut by
themselves—and the couple's attempts to sleep on deck are ruined by torrential rain and a close-call where Betsy nearly
slides overboard as the camera lists subtly to and fro. They eventually retire to the game room for one of the film's best sight
gags, where Buster tries to shuffle and deal a deck of hopelessly soggy playing cards as his girl quietly falls asleep on his
shoulder. When an intertitle announces "Weeks later—still drifting," we see that the couple has ingeniously solved all their
household woes. Rollo and Betsy now sleep in the ship's twin boilers, down in the hull, and they've rigged Rube Goldberg-esque devices up in the
kitchen to streamline food prep.
As usual with Keaton's films,
The Navigator builds to a spectacular showpiece climax. In
The General it's the
train crash, in
Steamboat Bill, Jr. the hurricane, and here it's a tribe of cannibal natives intent on having Rollo and
Betsy for supper. When the ship runs aground on a hostile island and springs a leak, Buster dons an old-fashioned diving suit
and helmet and descends into the depths for the film's most iconic sequence, which was shot in the frigid waters of Lake
Tahoe. Rollo cuts a wire with a helpful lobster's claw, sword fights with a sword fish, and when he finally repairs the breach in
the hull, he comically "washes" his hands underwater in a simple but hilariously absurd pantomime. I won't spoil the
conclusion, but suffice it to say that there's a sudden reversal of fortune that makes for one of the best deus ex machina
endings ever.
After the movie-inside-a-dream-inside-a-movie complexity of
Sherlock Jr.—go ahead, think of it as the
Inception of its time—it's easy to see why audiences flocked to
The Navigator, a comparatively breezy
comedy with broad, gag-a-minute jokes. It was essentially a big populist blockbuster, albeit one infused with Keaton's
thoughtful and sophisticated brand of deadpan slapstick. The Great Stone Face is his typically smile-less self here—pratfalling
gracefully, letting his dolorous eyes carry his character's emotions—and Kathryn McGuire makes a great foil, literally keeping
pace with Keaton's physical abilities. Their best bit together, though, is sweet and subtle, so subtle, in fact, that you might
miss it entirely. Look carefully in the scene where Rollo and Betsy—in their sailor suits—carry candles and peer through the
ship's interior; when Betsy leans over to get a better look, you can spy her shadow ever so lightly planting a kiss on the cheek
of Buster's shadow. As much as Keaton impresses with his larger-than-life action set pieces, it's the small moments like these
that give his films their humanity and warmth.
The Navigator Blu-ray, Video Quality
If you've bought Kino's other Buster Keaton Blu-ray releases—and if you haven't, you should—you'll already be familiar with
the quality of
The Navigator's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer. Sourced from a 35mm print donated by the Raymond
Rohauer Collection, the film is essentially presented as-is, with no significant restoration work. You'll notice white specks and
vertical scratches, light staining, slight brightness fluctuations, and the occasional appearance of the sprocket holes
encroaching on the 1.35:1 frame, but nothing out of the ordinary for a movie that's now almost 90 years old. I'm often curious
what these Keaton films would look like in the hands of, say, The Criterion Collection—with a comprehensive digital restoration
—but there's a certain purity to Kino's approach. Each speck and scratch, is, after all, a part of the print's history. Regardless,
The Navigator looks better than ever here. Film grain is visible—there's been no DNR smoothing or edge enhancement
—and the level of clarity bests previous DVD editions by fathoms, with newly appreciable detail in each frame. The film
has been digitally tinted per original specifications—blue at night, green underwater, sepia most of the rest of the time
—and the coloring seems natural. The contrast balance is spot-on too, with deep blacks and bright but rarely overblown
highlights.
