Director: Albert Parker
Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Tempe Pigott, Donald Crisp
Have I Seen It Before: Never. I’m almost ashamed to admit I never knew that experiments with color motion pictures predated, or at least were semi-concurrent with the advent of sound.
Did I Like It: Here’s an axiom that also feels like a controversial statement, and sounds a little bit like a shame: new technology slows down films considerably. They’re just now getting to the point where IMAX pictures don’t lock the heavy cameras down to a scene that would have to live and die by its expansive background. The first five to ten years of synchronized sound in the movies wound up being just recorded theater. So, too, does the vibrancy of an adventure film from Fairbanks while he was still at the top of his game feels a little weighed down by the groaning attempts to get two strips of color out of nitrate stock.
But it kind of works. There’s an added dimension to everything.
Which is another problem when it comes to the increasing resolution of the moving picture. The old Batman episodes eventually started getting released on DVD, and everybody started to suspect the Joker had a mustache under all of that makeup. Here, too, maybe the audience was hadn’t developed guile yet, nitrate stock would only show the human eye so much, and special effects were still being perfected by the Germans, but every time this film cuts to a wide shot of any ship at seat, it’s clear that it is nothing more than a whittled piece of wood floating in a small tank of water.
So, maybe I would recommend taking in a clip of this in order to take in the earliest of color film as the experiment it was. But if you’re really looking to enjoy a Fairbanks, I’d say stick with The Mark of Zorro (1920).