The Mark of Zorro (1920)
In Spanish colonial California, foppish nobleman Don Diego Vega secretly dons a mask and blade as Zorro to defend peasants from a corrupt governor and his soldiers, all while wooing the spirited Lolita Pulido, who has no idea her two suitors are the same man.
The Mark of Zorro made Douglas Fairbanks the screen’s first great swashbuckler and gave pulp fiction one of its most durable characters, a masked avenger with a double identity whose influence biographer Jeffrey Vance traces all the way to Batman. It was added to the National Film Registry in 2015.
Background
The Mark of Zorro was one of the first films Douglas Fairbanks made through his own production company, and it marked a turn in his career away from the contemporary comic roles that had made him famous and toward the swashbuckling costume adventures he would be remembered for afterward. Fairbanks plays both the foppish Don Diego and his masked alter ego Zorro, a dual role that let him show off both comic timing and athletic swordplay in the same film.
What to watch for
Watch for the way the film plays with the secret-identity structure, Don Diego’s affected weakness is a performance meant to deflect suspicion, and the gap between that performance and Zorro’s real competence is much of the fun. The character’s influence reached far beyond this one film: later pulp and comic-book creators have pointed to Zorro’s mask, cape, and double life as a direct ancestor of costumed heroes that came much later. It is a good introduction to the kind of adventure role that defined the rest of Fairbanks’s career.
