His Majesty, The American (1919)

Director: Joseph Henabery

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Marjorie Daw, Frank Campeau, Sam Southern

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I slept through opening weekend because I wouldn’t be born for another 65 years.

Did I Like It: When the film is a pulpy, frothy concoction following Bill (Fairbanks) seeking thrills, it’s kind of fun. One wonders if Bob Kane and Bill Finger (mostly Finger) saw the death-defying adventures of a trust fund kid sliding down a fire pole to free-lance with first responders and thought there was certainly something there. Why, in this film he almost buckles swashes, even if his turn in The Mark of Zorro (1920) is still in the offing.

When it tries to be some sort of political drama or satire or… Something. It never seems to settle on what it wants to do in acts two and three. Whatever it wants to be, I think its safe to say that it is less than successful. The search for the heir to Montenac is so predictable as to be a foregone conclusion the moment it is introduced. The film then proceeds for another hour going through the motions of resolving that plot whilr still producing the number of reels that Fairbanks, Griffith, Pickford, and Chaplin needed to make their United Artists experiment work*.

One might write off such complaints as me not being willing to allow for less sophisticated audiences more than a hundred years ago, but I think that’s unreasonable. The players here an their contemporaries can make films that still resonate today. This may be a middling effort, and there is a reason that people know Fairbanks more for Zorro than anything else. I’m glad that the film is preserved as well as it is—the several generations removed digital projection was just fine—but I sure hope a better film didn’t disappear to the vagaries of nitrate film in favor of this.

*The one moment of impish magic that unassailably works is the film’s opening title that makes the case for UA, which a laughing Fairbanks interrupts before the film proper begins.

The Mark of Zorro (1920)

Director: Fred Niblo

Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery, Sr., Charles Hill Mailes

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I may be one of the last people alive still sticking up for the silent era, but I keep making the classic blunder that all the format really has to offer are broad comedies. There’s plenty of horror, science fiction, and in this instance, action to offer.

Did I Like It: But is this even an action picture? One thinks of Zorro as an action character, but this is probably more of a romance than anything else. Ultimately, The Curse of Capistrano—on which all of the various Marks are based—is also a romance, so this can’t really be leveled as a criticism. The silent form lends itself well to that genre, requiring a higher degree of theatricality in the performances, which inoculates the proceedings from accusations of possessing a saccharin quality. I might say that by this point in the refinement of the cinematic for, director Niblo and producer (and likely author of the larger part of the affair) Fairbanks could have done more with the camera to make those scenes in which buckles were rightly swashed, buckle a bit more swashy.

Fairbanks as a performer is uniquely suited to the role. He lurches through every stunt asked of him not with a nimble grace that makes the action seem like a dance, but more of the barreling action of an athelete. When Zorro leaps, you feel as if it might actually hurt. But more importantly, he adopts a key element to his dual role of Don Diego and Zorro by making the Don a slinking nebbish. When literally everyone in California is shocked to find out the two men are one in the same, I buy their shock. Fairbanks walked through this role so that Christopher Reeve and the vocal work of Kevin Conroy could run with it.