Two spoiled rich people find themselves trapped on an empty passenger ship. Rollo decides to marry his sweetheart Betsy and sail to Honolulu. When she rejects him he decides to go alone but boards the wrong ship, the "Navigator" owned by Betsy's father. Unaware of this, Betsy boards the ship to look for her father. whom spies capture before cutting the ship loose. It drifts out to sea with the two socialites each unaware of there being anyone else on board. This was the second silent film that I have ever watched and I found it to be a great movie and well thought out. This movie was very funny and had quite a few scenes that had me laughing so much not only because how funny it was but because it was just so ridiculous that you couldn't help to laugh. There were two scenes that stuck out to me th most. The first was when Buster Keaton and the girl on the boat were trying to find each other and were running around in circles on the boat for almost five minutes. The second part the was laugh out loud funny was when Buster Keaton was in the kitchen trying to cook eggs and open cans but was having the hardest time. This movie was a fantastic movie and i would recommend anyone who has to watch a silent film or just wants to to see this one 'The Navigator' was my introduction to Buster Keaton. I have to say that, not just Keaton, I, too, remained largely wooden faced through the film. The art of silent slapstick comedy, as perfected by Sir Charles Chaplin and his ilk, is not easy … the timing has to be precise, as also the spacing of the gags, and, here, I feel, 'The Navigator', somehow, fails to deliver. Which is not to say it is not without its funny moments … there are a few genuine laughs along the way but, at the end of it all, you are left feeling a trifle dissatisfied. Much of the humor is repetitive, and the underwater scenes, though praised by some, seemed to me to drag on interminably. I, at least, got a distinct feeling that Keaton, in this one at least, was short of ideas … the last 15 minutes of the film, in my view, underscore this perfectly - they do nothing for the film at all. So that, once the end credits rolled, I was left a feeling that it was all "much ado about nothing".<br/><br/>Humdrum viewing, at best.
Latyeldw replied
365 weeks ago