Last week’s look at some posters from the silent movie era inspired me to go ahead with this list of what I consider to be the top Douglas Fairbanks films prior to sound. (Talkies are just a fad, I’m tellin’ ya!)
THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920) – Douglas Fairbanks digs into his comedic AND acrobatic skills in this first screen adaptation of Johnston McCully’s masked hero of 1820s California (The Curse of Capistrano had just been published the year before and Fairbanks bought the film rights for United Artists.)
In my opinion no actor has ever done a better job of drawing such a pronounced distinction between the foppish and timid Don Diego de Vega and his dashing alter ego, the swordsman Zorro. This movie showed all subsequent swashbuckler movies how it’s done and proved that its star could do more than just comedy.
Excellent fight choreography, heroic opposition to tyranny and the rousing, marathon chase and fight scene near the film’s finale make The Mark of Zorro an absolute must-see for anyone curious about silent movies. Nearly every frame of the film is a portrait.
Marguerite De La Motte played the love interest Lolita Pulido, Tote Du Crow portrayed Don Diego’s mute manservant Bernardo, Robert McKim was the villainous Captain Ramon and Walt “Not the Poet” Whitman played Fray Felipe to round out the core characters from the many Zorro tales. Continue reading
WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965) – TWO PETERS, ONE WOODY should probably have been the title of this blog post. Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen starred in this brazen (for its day) sex comedy set in Paris during the Swinging Sixties. 
The end result is still hailed for its pioneering depiction of promiscuity in a major studio release. The relaxing of cinematic standards permitted What’s New Pussycat? to be bolder and kinkier than any pre-1965 production could have been. Compared to films of the past 55 years, however, it often seems as mild and self-consciously “zany” as an episode of Three’s Company, which was daring for television of the 1970s but certainly not today. 
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