The Mark of Zorro (1920)

The Mark of Zorro (1920) staring Douglas Fairbanks is actually the only silent movie I have purchased; however, I did not watch more than 5 minutes of it until today. Let me explain. When I was in college, I saw it on VHS in one of those $5 movie bins. I was pretty excited about finding the original of The Mark of Zorro. The 1940 remake with Tyrone Power was, and is still, one of my favorite classic films, and I knew that Fairbanks was one of the first movie stars so watching the silent original seemed like a fun idea. Unfortunately, the VHS version had no musical score…proving that silent films were never intended to be truly silent! I couldn’t make it past the first scene with out the score. Think about it. The greatest movies always have the greatest musical scores. Music can make or break a movie. Last of the Mohicans, Glory, Schindler’s List, Henry V all great movies; all fantastic musical scores. They say, and I see no reason not to believe it, that people would pick their movie theaters in the silent era based on the organist playing the music. If you think about it, a terrible organist could ruin a movie. Imagine Jurassic Park, with a wrong note being played ever few measures. Let’s be honest, everyone would have been cheering on the T-Rex hoping to have an excuse to leave the theater an hour early! And so, about 10 years ago, when I purchased and attempted for the first time to watch the original The Mark of Zorro, I realized that music was saving movies long before movies even had sound! Go music!

Fortunately, the Netflix version does have a musical score, and so after almost a decade I finally finished watching the 1920 version. I have to be honest; I still like the 1940 version better. Other than every D.W. Griffith film I've ever tried to watch (I’m sorry but D.W. Griffith bugs me, in addition to the whole “bringing back the KKK” thing, his movies make me want to cry out “seriously, kill me now rather than make me watch this”...if you have to try that hard to make a movie “an epic” its not an epic!), the original Mark of Zorro is the first silent movie I kind of didn’t like. It did grow on me and by the end I could appreciate Fairbanks as the “swashbuckling” star that he was in his day, but also, in the end, Tyrone Power was a better Zorro. Power’s portrayal of the foppish Don Diego juxtaposed with the strong hero Zorro should be the prototype of a hero and his alter ego. You really get why no one can guess he is Zorro, and it makes his opposition to the oppressive and tyrannical authorities that much sweeter because he is basically messing with them the whole time. It’s not the Clark Kent/Superman idiocy (seriously the entire Daily Planet should have their sanity questioned for not figuring that one out!) Fairbanks’ Don Diego comes across not with the foppishness that creates an inside joke between the actor and the audience, but rather like a doddering fool. Also, his Zorro is a little too “silent film” campy. He certainly could sword fight, but in the first maybe 45 minutes, he’s also a little creepy. He grows into his “hero” status, the turning point being the scene when he saves Senorita Pulida from the unwanted advances of Captain Ramon, but the character development was too little too late, in my opinion. He was trying to do the same thing with this complex character that both Tyrone Power and eventually Antonio Banderas (in the “sort of” third incarnation of this movie) would successfully do, but in my opinion Fairbanks didn’t really pull it off.

When I sat down to write this, I tried to figure out if Fairbanks was really that bad, or if I was just being horribly biased, because childhood memories always taint our perspective, but here’s what I realized: Tyrone Power IS Zorro. Here’s my reasoning. When Antonio Banderas portrayed Zorro in The Mask of Zorro, his portrayal was good, but it was simply a re-do of Power’s version. Banderas is a talented actor who did a fantastic job as Zorro, don’t get me wrong, but as Zorro, he was simply recreating the perfection the Power had already fashioned some 60 years earlier. However, Power wasn’t the original Zorro; Fairbanks was. And yet, in the 1940 version Power wasn’t recreating what Fairbanks had already created; he was reimagining it, perfecting it. To remake a movie and be better than the guy before you, that’s the sign of acting perfection and that is why Tyrone Power is and always will be THE Zorro. It is also why, if you go to watch The Mark of Zorro, I say skip the silent film and grab the talkie!

The talkie is fantastic; the silent is “positively tepid” (if you watch the talkie, you’ll get why that is positively hilarious!)