Nido de amor

Buster Keaton decides to finish with the woman who breaks off their engagement and sail off to sea, but he ends up as a crew member of a ship run by a cruel captain who has a habit of throwing those who displease him overboard. Keaton's last short is a disappointingly average effort, suggesting perhaps that his mind was already on bigger things.

I watched this with my 2 kids aged 10 and 12 in attempt to give them some further experience of silent movies. We watched all the Our Gang comedies, including the silents, 5 years ago - we've seen several Chaplin films (Modern Times, City Lights). These few films we are watching of Keaton's will definitely start a new round of silent film appreciation. I think this is the funniest of the bunch we have right now, but my kids love the Navigator even more. They have even introduced a few of their friends to the joys of this classic era. It is painful to know of genius not recognized in its time, and I think that is why so many people compare Keaton and Chaplin so often. Chaplin got the fame and fortune, Buster got a bad deal and never lost his spirit. Keaton was an extraordinary human being as well as one of the film greats - remembered for his greatness of character and the depth of his on-film persona. I give this one a 10!

Now here's a Keaton short I can confidently recommend.

In contrast to "The Boat", Buster is not at the mercy of physics here. This time he causes the chaos, and he's aware of it. He spends the duration wriggling his way out of trouble, instead of more deeply into it.

The absurd tone of the whole thing is set by the goofs in what is a sort of anti-"Dear John" letter ("PS If you do not receive this letter, write me").

But what makes this special is the revelation that this is one big slapstick dream. And...all of that is wrapped within another envelope of absurdity, exposed to us in brilliant visual shorthand -- add them up and you have something quite uniquely cinematic.

This short comedy is less polished than Keaton's best features, but it has some very funny moments, with a good finale that is clever and also suggestive. Keaton and the supporting cast pull of most of the gag ideas quite well. The setting might offer more limited possibilities than do many of Keaton's other short features, but they seem to have gotten the most out of the material.

The story opens with Buster, depressed because of romantic difficulties, setting off in a tiny boat to get away from it all, leading to many unexpected developments. Joe Roberts is well-cast as Buster's antagonist, and there are some amusing confrontations between the two. Virginia Fox also helps out.

Buster pulls off some good morbid gags, with his deadpan style serving well in making them work. There are also a number of nice subtle humorous touches. Most Keaton fans should enjoy this one.

If only a handful of excerpted highlights had survived from "The Love Nest" (a title which, incidentally, bears the most tangential reference to the action of the film, being an ironic comment on the hostile environment in which Buster ends up), we should probably be mourning it as a lost masterpiece. And indeed, in common with even the most unsatisfactory of Buster Keaton's shorts, it contains moments of pure originality: the man had an inspired talent.

However, on seeing it as a whole, I found it somewhat disjointed. The best of Keaton's work builds from one gag to its culmination in the next as a seamless whole, while this one comes across more as a series of assorted sketches, some of which sound good in isolation (the fish-shooting scene), some of which are in themselves a little lame ("All hands on deck"?), but only some of which really integrate into the central, darkly entertaining, storyline of the ship and her homicidal captain. And I have to confess to being disconcerted by some very poor quality special effects and the use of battered stock footage, in contrast to Keaton's usual emphasis on non-fakery: perhaps this was a deliberate statement of some kind on the nature of reality and non-reality, but if so it passed me by. While a number of Keaton's films, e.g. "The Frozen North" or "Sherlock Jr", rely on the dream-sequence theme, here it really came across to me as over-used: either the film is trying to be too clever for its own good, or else it strikes you as simply cheating...

Views on "The Love Nest" seem to be polarised between 'sardonic pinnacle of achievement' and 'not one of Buster's best'; those of us in the second category are evidently overlooking something! But -- while there are certainly sequences I should hate to see lost -- it's one of my least favourite silent shorts.