The Thief of Bagdad is a 1924 American swashbuckler film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks. Freely adapted from One Thousand and One Nights, it tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph of Bagdad. In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry… Read more →
Don Q, Son of Zorro is the 1925 sequel to the 1920 silent film The Mark of Zorro. It was loosely based upon the 1909 novel Don Q.’s Love Story, written by the mother-and-son duo Kate and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard. The story was reworked in 1925 (after Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard’s death) into a vehicle for the Johnston McCulley character Zorro. The film… Read more →
The Nut is a 1921 American silent film comedy directed by Theodore Reed. Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance writes, “Admittedly a minor work, The Nut is frequently dismissed in critical assessments of Fairbanks’s career. This is unfortunate, for it contains some fascinating sequences and reveals much about the actor-producer’s state of mind at the time it was made.” Vance also notes,… Read more →
American Aristocracy is a 1916 American silent adventure/comedy-drama film directed by Lloyd Ingraham and starring Douglas Fairbanks. A 35mm print of the film is preserved at the George Eastman House and is currently in the public domain. Cast: Douglas Fairbanks as Cassius Lee Jewel Carmen as Geraldine Hicks Charles DeLima as Leander Hicks Albert Parker as Percy Horton Artie Ortego… Read more →
The Three Musketeers is a 1921 American silent film based on the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, père. It was directed by Fred Niblo and stars Douglas Fairbanks as d’Artagnan. The film originally had scenes filmed in the Handschiegl Color Process (billed as the “Wyckoff-DeMille Process”). The film had a sequel, The Iron Mask (1929), also starring Fairbanks… Read more →
The Mark of Zorro is a 1920 silent adventure romance film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Noah Beery, Sr.. This genre-defining swashbuckler adventure was the first movie version of The Mark of Zorro. Based on the 1919 story “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley, which introduced the masked hero, Zorro, the screenplay was adapted by Fairbanks (as “Elton Thomas”) and… Read more →
The Black Pirate is a 1926 silent adventure film shot entirely in two-color Technicolor about an adventurer and a “company” of pirates. It stars Douglas Fairbanks, Donald Crisp, Sam De Grasse, and Billie Dove. The Black Pirate was the third feature to be filmed in an early two-tone Technicolor process that had been first introduced in the 1922 feature Toll… Read more →
