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.