Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Excellent but underrated film

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

"The Navigator" is a silent movie from the 20's starring Buster Keaton about a young, snobby man who decides to marry and all of a sudden finds himself trapped on a ship with his designated bride to be. Quite unlucky in his actions, he soon gets the two of them in serious trouble.The film is a classical slapstick movie. Most of the playtime consists of Keaton doing something stupid, falling over things or breaking them. The story definitely has some plot holes and some of the details are just never explained but every here and then there's actually a decent gag presented. Of course as a silent film this one works a lot with visual humor and that's just something modern audiences aren't really used to. From today's perspective, some of the sequences seem quite long and there are passages in which not much happens. For all those reasons it was a bit hard for me to find access to the film, even though I do appreciate the efforts undertaken to produce a movie back in the days.All in all this is probably first and foremost something for slapstick- or Buster Keaton-Fans. If you're looking for straight-forward, visual comedy, this might be a thing for you. Otherwise I have to say that there are alternatives worth considering.

Perfection and one of the greatest comedies ever made. Is "The Navigator" the best of Keaton, (he co-directed it with Donald Crisp)? Impossible to say since there are so many masterpieces. This is the one in which he is adrift on an ocean liner with the girl he hopes to marry. It's short, much too short; at under one hour it hardly qualifies as a feature but it has some of the best visual gags in all of cinema while Keaton's performance is, of course, nothing short of sublime. The climatic sequences involving a tribe of cannibals may hardly seem very PC these days but we must remember when the film was made. At least there are no Stepin Fetchit butlers in this one.

Buster Keaton does a great job keeping the audience on the edge of their seats during this silent film. What the movie loses from lack of sound, it makes up for with Keaton's expressions and seemingly clueless looks. He does a great job of portraying the helpless rich man who obviously has never needed to lift a finger to do anything for himself. I felt that the scenes on "The Navigator" steamboat were very funny and showed the comedy from the time. The only thing i was not impressed with was the part involving the natives. I just don't think it went with the rest of the movie well, and that the "terrorist" group in the beginning should have been reintroduced. Though i wasn't impressed with the natives, I did enjoy the scenes where Keaton was underwater attempting to fix the ship (especially the scene he fences with the swordfish).

While his set-pieces were certainly on a lower scale than Harold Lloyd, and his films were less politically and socially aware than Charles Chaplin, the great Buster Keaton was certainly a resourceful man, and wholly dedicated to the art of prop comedy. In 1924, he would buy his biggest prop in the USAT Buford, a liner that served in World War I and was destined for the scrap heap until Keaton stepped in. Keaton and co- director Donald Crisp sat down to write a new comedy based around their new toy, a giant ship that was ripe with endless comedic possibilities, and one which Keaton had free reign. And out of this came The Navigator, one of Buster Keaton's most loved comedies.Bored rich-kid Rollo Treadway (Keaton) decides one day to get married, and travels across the street to propose to neighbour Betsy (Kathryn McGuire). Confident that she will say yes, he asks his servant to book honeymoon tickets for Honolulu that very night, but naturally, she turns him down. Rollo decides to go anyway, and a mistake leads to him getting on the wrong ship, the SS Navigator, which has just be sold to an enemy by Betsy's father in an unknown war. Her father is seized while checking the ship by some local gangsters, and Betsy, hearing her father's shouts, wanders onto the ship before it is cut loose. The ship drifts out into the Pacific Ocean, with Rollo and Betsy all alone to face the perils of savage tribes, dodgy equipment, and having to make breakfast all by themselves.While I do prefer the films of Chaplin, Keaton's reputation as the greatest physical comedian of all time is well justified, with his doe- eyed, helpless expression providing some great subtle comedy between the prat-falls (his nickname was the Great Stone Face). One of the opening scenes aboard the ship has the two characters sensing each other's presence and running manically around the ship, missing each other by inches. It's a remarkably well-timed moment, and McGuire (who co-starred in other Keaton films) proves game and much more than the archetypal love interest. Although I much preferred the likes of Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The General (1926) and Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928), there are some inspired moments here involving Rollo's helpless attempts to open a can of food, a rickety deck-chair, and an underwater sword-fight with a swordfish. If the ending is tinged with a bit of racism (they're black and on an island, of course they're cannibals!), it seems to be more of a case of innocent ignorance, and The Navigator is a 60-minute hoot, though some plot-strands are left somewhat neglected and open-ended.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com