Regarding the historical basis for Zorro question - The 1920 Douglas Fairbanks movie, which I just saw last week, is called “The Mark of Zorro,” not “The Mask of Zorro.” The Banderas film, described as a “remake” of the Fairbanks film, is AFAIK the first movie to bear the name “The Mask of Zorro,” and beyond that is certainly not a remake of any other film.
Fairbanks’ “Mark of Zorro” was remade in 1940 with Tyrone Power in the title role. It’s a decent film, although Power’s swashbuckling doesn’t hold a candle to Fairbanks’s astonishing third-act acrobatics.
That would be the rerelease of the 1940 remake starring Tyrone Power, not the 1920 original starring Douglas Fairbanks. The 1940 Power version is a fine film, but Fairbanks rocks. He’s in a class by himself. The last reel of his Mark of Zorro contains some of the best acrobatic swashbuckling I’ve seen this side of Jackie Chan. I watched this movie with my two older kids (8 and 4) a couple of weeks ago, and we all enjoyed it immensely. (The only downside was that 4-year-old David was later found scratching “D”'s all over the house.)
Incidentally, Fairbanks also made a sequel five years later called Don Q, Son of Zorro that’s an even better film – a much better plot, better pacing, more consistent action throughout, not to mention lavish sets and Fairbanks in dual roles as the aging Zorro and his grown son, Don Cesar. There’s no single action set piece that quite matches the last reel of the earlier film, but Fairbanks has great moves throughout, and demonstrates startling skill with a whip (definitely a precursor to Indiana Jones!). This movie also was a bit hit with my kids, despite being silent and B&W.
That feature is not activated, SDG. We’ve had problems in the past, in other forums, with people who make outrageous statements, provoke reactions, and then edit their own initial post afterwards.
Thus, only Moderators or Administrators can edit posts. If you have a simple error (like you goof up a link or something), a moderator or administrator will usually be happy to help you by editing for you.
Nah, I’m just a perfectionist, I always like to tweak my writing. In the above case I wanted to remove the attempted italics formatting after discovering that it didn’t work. No big thing…
OK, SDG, post edited to fix your italics. Use square brackets [ ] instead of pointy brackes < > in future, but I’m happy to help anyone who has their kids watch silent movies!
Hey, kids are the greatest audience of silent movies, totally without the prejudices most grownups have against the medium. Another big hit with my kids was the 1927 silent comedy classic The Kid Brother starring Harold Lloyd, the third of the three great masters of silent comedy and possibly the most successful in his own day (even though today many more people have heard of Keaton and Chaplin). Our whole family has watched Kid Brother more than once. There’s just no reason kids who can watch the “Road Runner” cartoons can’t appreciate the great silent slapstick masters that the Warner Bros animators grew up watching and emulated in their work.
In a similar vein, I have to say I’m enormously intrigued by the concept of Mel Gibson not only making the Jim Caviezel-starring Passion entirely in Aramaic and Latin, but also omitting subtitles. If those crazy fools pull it off, it could be a monumental tour de force, even though it’s not going to pull mainstream audiences into multiplexes. To the extent that it’s appropriate for kids to watch, though, I bet they wouldn’t have a problem with it. Certainly I would show at least parts of it to my kids on DVD.
And in at least one of the retellings of the story, it was actually Bambi that the Wayne family went to see, with Thomas Wayne verbally abusing Bruce about crying during it. That memory was later “repressed/altered” by Bruce to the Mark of Zorro version.
