The Mark of Zorro introduces the Hollywood action hero
Written by Roger Kimmel Smith
See “The Mark of Zorro” (1920) at Silent Movie Under the Stars at Upper Robert Treman State Park, Saturday, August 24, starting around 8pm. The event is free.
There’s no doubt about it: The Mark of Zorro still hits its mark, more than a century later. This silent feature film from 1920 inaugurated one of the most popular of all U.S. cinema genres, the swashbuckling action-adventure flick.
In the role of the masked caballero avenger, the ever-airborne Douglas Fairbanks leaped to superstardom. Some of the biggest box-office blockbusters and franchises in film history — the action heroes, comic-book superheroes, all those variations on boyhood fantasy — derive more or less directly from the Fairbanks swashbuckling cycle of the 1920s, and especially from Señor Zorro himself, one of the most enduring of these hero characters.
THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX
The novel that introduced Zorro (which is Spanish for fox) was published as a pulp magazine serial in 1919 called The Curse of Capistrano. That is another name for our outlaw protagonist, a sobriquet used by his pursuers, Captain Ramón and Sergeant Pedro Gonzales. The author, Johnston McCulley, was a newspaper man from Illinois who moved to California and fell in love with its Spanish history. He laid this story, and many others, in the pre-statehood California of El Camino Real, missions, haciendas, and “the little pueblo of Reina de Los Angeles, where, in years to come, a great city would grow…” McCulley also invented, under half a dozen pseudonyms, a squadron of other pulp paragons with such lurid names as the Thunderbolt, the Green Ghost, the Scarlet Scourge, and Captain Fly-by-Night.
In addition to starring, Fairbanks produced the film, and co-wrote its scenario under his two real middle names, Elton Thomas. Fred Niblo’s unobtrusive direction allows the viewer to focus purely on the leading man’s kinetic performance — quite similar to the way Fairbanks’s close friend Charlie Chaplin used the camera.
Fairbanks read McCulley’s yarn in All-Story Weekly magazine and decided to bring it to the screen. He may not have known it at the time, but he had identified one of the most bankable fictional properties in all modern literature and media. The black-clad, caped crusader with the double identity embodies all the elements of the celluloid superhero. A master of movement in the saddle and with the sword, he leaves his insignia, literally, on the flesh of his bitterest foes. Obeying the code of the honorable bandido, he foments a rebellion against corrupt colonial authorities with all the derring-do of a d’Artagnan or Robin Hood — the very roles Fairbanks would play next.
One clear precursor to Señor Zorro is the Scarlet Pimpernel, hero of the play and novel by that name authored by the Baroness Orczy in the 1900s and adapted twice for the silent screen in the 1910s. The red pimpernel flower, like the mark of Zorro itself, is the signature the hero leaves behind at the scene of his exploits. Both characters are noblemen who effect a dandyish air to deflect suspicion from the vigilante work they carry out under secret identities. In turn, Zorro was the principal model inspiring Bob Kane’s invention of Batman in the 1930s.
Among the dozens of film and television versions of Zorro and his exploits, some of the most memorable include the 1940 Mark of Zorro talkie, starring Tyrone Power and directed by the great Rouben Mamoulian; a 1950s Disney TV series; the comedy Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981), starring the supremely suntanned George Hamilton; and Antonio Banderas as the next-generation swordsman in The Mask of Zorro (1998). None of these performances equaled the romantic magnetism and lighthearted zest Fairbanks brought to the role.
Before he made Zorro, Fairbanks had already achieved considerable success and fame in the movies. Born in Denver in 1883 and raised by a single mother, he became a stage performer in his youth and toured with a traveling theatrical company as a teenager. He began landing lead roles on Broadway and made a hit in 1906 with Man of the Hour. In 1915, he moved to Los Angeles and went to work for the Triangle Film Corporation under the supervision of D.W. Griffith.
From his first screen appearance in The Lamb (1915), Fairbanks proved himself an audience pleaser with his sunny, go-getter personality and irrepressible athleticism. Between 1915 and 1920 — crucial years in the growth of film as an industry and an art form, and especially in the development of feature-length movies — Fairbanks starred in thirty titles, including an incredible ten features in 1916 alone. These were mostly high-action contemporary comedies, plus a few westerns. Typically, Fairbanks is cast as the son of a wealthy businessman looking for a way to prove himself, which he eventually does through acts of astounding physical heroism pulled off with unflappable nonchalance.
THRILLS, COMEDY, ROMANCE
These films have a certain amount in common with the work of Harold Lloyd — although the Fairbanks character never lets up from the Safety Last level of bravado. In one of the last of this cycle, His Majesty, the American (1919), a clever intertitle introduces him as a “Fire-eating, Speed-loving, Space-annihilating, Excitement-hunting Thrill Hound.” That about captures it.
Then Fairbanks decided to gamble by making The Mark of Zorro. It was a shift in tone, but not a very big one, and in many ways a natural progression for his screen persona. The essentials of his appeal were unchanged. Thrills, romance, and comedy remained the basic elements, with the addition of costumes, grandiose sets, and a backdrop of fantasy or legend.
The experiment succeeded wildly. Zorro made back more than three times its production cost and was by far the biggest Fairbanks hit to date. Fairbanks was already a big star, but from Zorro on he advanced to another level. At the very start of the roaring twenties, as the moving pictures were just beginning to ignite the modern phenomenon of celebrity culture — a permanent nationwide conflagration sparked by arc lamps and flickering black-and-white images — Douglas Fairbanks bestrode the new kingdom of dreams, its crown prince, its first legendary leading man.
Part of the ascent of Fairbanks had to do with events offscreen and behind the scenes — but let’s save all that, and for now just linger on the evidence the films themselves provide. In those intensely eventful years right around 1920, the silent cinema coming out of the new Hollywood colony dramatically improved in production quality. The photography and mise-en-scene of the better works became far sharper. Photoplays had more narrative coherence, more confident storytelling.
A key component of this upgrade was the increasing output of feature-length pieces. This wasn’t just a matter of greater running time. The atmosphere of the two-reelers, their overall production aesthetic, is generally fast, loose, and slapdash. Early silent short subjects can be exhilarating at their best, vertiginous at their worst. By contrast, feature-length narratives by their nature let the whole cinematic process unfold more slowly. Images acquire more weight; what appears in the frame can take on greater depth and dimension.
Doug Fairbanks’s evolution from an everyman-type comic hero to a swashbuckling action hero dovetailed beautifully with the industry’s concurrent adjustment in production values. Five years after Griffith had pointed the medium’s way forward with the politically backward Birth of a Nation (1915), Hollywood was coming into its own, ready to commence churning out convincing blockbusters at scale. For the Fairbanks team, adding the costume element magnified the intensity of the story arcs and action sequences. With his Zorro, Three Musketeers (1921), and Robin Hood (1922), Fairbanks and his colleagues were beginning to fulfill the cinema’s potential for creating legends. The climax of this cycle, arguably, is The Thief of Bagdad (1924); Fairbanks’s Arabian Nights fantasy, with sumptuous art direction by William Cameron Menzies, is truly a visual spectacular.
It’s significant that Fairbanks established his screen personality in comedies. His lightheartedness and refusal to take himself too seriously are essential to the model he cast for all successive screen swashbucklers in his wake. He’s not a leaden, overblown, or brooding figure. But he’s also not a clown in the way Chaplin, Lloyd, and Buster Keaton were; he makes a credible romantic lead. In other words, he’s the whole package.
The comic moments in The Mark of Zorro derive mostly from the protagonist’s alternate personality, his so-called real identity: the aristocratic young caballero Don Diego Vega, scion of an influential Reina de Los Angeles family. The picture gives the viewer two strikingly different Douglas Fairbanks performances for the price of one.
In covering last year’s Under the Stars presentation, Beverly of Graustark, I discussed how Marion Davies made copious use of the double-role tactic. It was a fairly common gimmick in both the silents and the talkies. Mary Pickford, for example, was lauded for her double turns in, among other pictures, Stella Maris (1917) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921). She played mother and son in the latter.
Don Diego Vega makes an extremely amusing foil or comic double to the masked Zorro — a “languid” youth who tires easily, despises violence, and rarely wears his sword. Fairbanks, let us say, gives Don Diego an accentuated swish. The mild-mannered Clark Kent came to mind as I watched his body language.
As for the romance element, it is naturally central to the plot. In McCulley’s novel, which reads very much like a contemporary bodice-ripper, Señorita Lolita Pulido, Señor Zorro’s love interest, is a courageous heroine who rides her own steed through harm’s way and is fearlessly ready to die alongside her beloved bandido when they are beset by foes after the climactic chase.
The film, sadly, denies Marguerite De La Motte’s Lolita any boldness of this sort. She does, however, have to endure the profoundly lifeless courtship behavior of Don Diego Vega, showing admirable forbearance in so doing. Fortunately, the masked avenger — who, we are told, “appears through keyholes” — is on the scene to rescue her honor from the predatory advances of Captain Ramón. And that, ladies and gentleman, is how a caballero wins the corazón of a señorita. After a beat, she comes close and says, “I give you — freely — the kiss he would have taken.” ¡Ay, mucho calor!
In short, it’s easy to see why The Mark of Zorro was a smash hit that set a new trajectory for its star’s stratospheric career and even contributed to building the movies into a towering American industry. More about that last claim in the next installment of… “The Brand”!
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ROGER KIMMEL SMITH is a freelance wordsmith based in Ithaca. He hosts “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” (“music and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s in all genres and from around the world”), airing Fridays 12–2pm on WRFI Community Radio. As part of Silent Movie Month 2023, he curated and introduced a screening of shorts on the theme of Women in Early Silent Film. He is a former producer and co-host of the podcast “When Humanists Attack!!”
