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.