The Navigator Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

The Navigator Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 29, 2019

Note: This version of this film is available as part of The Buster Keaton Collection: Volume 2.

One of the little tidbits that was revealed in a passing comment by Charles Cohen in a supplement included on The Great Buster: A Celebration was that Cohen Media Group had acquired all but one of Buster Keaton’s silent films some time ago, and that the entire catalog was being brought up “to 4K standards”. I posited in our The Great Buster: A Celebration Blu-ray review that Cohen’s comment might augur well for future Keaton film releases from Cohen Media Group and/or Cohen Film Collection, and that prediction came true a couple of months ago with the release of The Buster Keaton Collection: Volume 1, which contained two of Keaton's all time classic films, The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr.. Cohen is now offering classic comedy fans a second dose of one of the immortals of silent cinema.

As with the first volume of Keaton classics from Cohen, both of the films in this second Buster Keaton volume have had previous Blu-ray releases courtesy of Kino. For a plot summary and the opportunity to compare screenshots between the Kino and Cohen versions, I refer you to my colleague Casey Broadwater's The Navigator Blu-ray review.

The Navigator Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Navigator is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection, an imprint of Cohen Media Group, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. The presentation begins with the following information:

The Keaton Project was launched in 2015 by Cineteca di Bologna and the Cohen Film Collection to restore all the films made by Buster Keaton between 1920 and 1928.

For the restoration of The Navigator, ten elements were inspected and analyzed; six of those — from the Cohen Film Collection and one from the Centre National du cinéma et de l'image animée I CNC — were digitized and compared. The latter was discovered to be a B negative.

A third generation safety dupicate positive. held by Cohen Film Collection, was finally selected for the restoration and scanned at 4K resolution.

Restoration was carried out at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and completed in June 2017.

The first thing most folks will notice when comparing the Kino version with this new Cohen version is that the Cohen version features none of the tinting of the Rohauer Collection print which was sourced for the Kino release. That may or may not bother some folks, but it does give the underwater material arguably just a bit more fine detail, though even here those sequences are hardly models of clarity, and grain can be quite heavy looking (see screenshot 8 for an example). I frankly probably would not have scored the Kino release quite as high as Casey did, and as with Sherlock Jr. in its Cohen iteration, the absence of major damage on this release is also a clear step up from the sometimes pretty badly distressed print utilized by Kino. That said, clarity is not always optimal here, as might be gleaned from the source mentioned above, and which once again brings up the unavoidable fact that even a 4K scan is dependent upon what is being scanned. Cohen typically is not a label that engages in wholesale digital tweaking of the releases it's curating, but I will say there's a rather noticeably wide variance in grain here. Some moments, as with the underwater footage, are pretty coarse looking, but other moments have little noticeable grain. I'm scoring this at 3.5, which may make some readers come to the understandable conclusion that it's somehow inferior to Kino's version, which Casey scored at 4.0. I'd only remind folks of my frequently repeated mantra "different reviewers, different opinions", but also of my previously mentioned confession that I probably would not have scored the Kino version at quite the four star level Casey did. One way or the other, I highly recommend those interested to parse the screenshots included with this review and compare them to the screenshots Casey uploaded to his review to at least give some indication of the differences between the two versions.

The Navigator Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Navigator features two renderings of Robert Israels' score, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The surround track definitely opens up the spaciousness of the score, while also providing at least marginally more energy to the midrange and lowest frequencies. Fidelity is excellent on both tracks, and there are no problems with any kind of distortion, dropouts or other distractions.

The Navigator Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Cohen has released this first set of Keaton films on one disc, and so the supplements are not necessarily tied only to one individual film.

• Buster Keaton: The Great Stone Face (1080p; 4:26) is another assortment of very brief talking head assessments of Keaton, along with snippets from films. All of these folks were seen in the first volume on the similar supplements included on that release.


• Buster Keaton: The Comedian (1080p; 3:51) is more of the same.


• Sherlock Jr. Restoration Trailer (1080p; 1:23)


• The Navigator Restoration Trailer (1080p; 1:01)

The Navigator Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Navigator makes for an interesting contrast and compare experiment with Sherlock Jr. — it has little to none of Sherlock Jr.'s "meta" qualities or occasionally preening intellectualism, but it arguably has something even better, namely near constant laughs. Keaton builds his sight gags in this film like a master architect designing an ornate house of cards which is guaranteed to fall (thereby provoking laughter, of course). Video here isn't at optimal levels, no doubt due to the source, but the score sounds great in either of its versions offered on the disc. As I stated in our Sherlock Jr. Blu-ray review, Cohen might want to think about providing more substantial supplements for these releases than brief, basically interchangeable, talking head snippets. Recommended.