National Post (National Edition)
Zorro still leaves a mark
ORIGINAL ACTION HERO IN HIS 100TH YEAR ON SCREEN IS AN INSPIRATION FOR 2021
He's the most influential action figure in film history and the happiest movie warrior of all time.
This moral rebel, who leaps into battle with a smile and the motto “justice for all,” set the stage for all the gallant swashbucklers who followed. His agility at balancing alter egos spawned the seminal comic book heroes Superman and Batman. He has always symbolized a bold country with beaming optimism and democratic virtues of tolerance and inclusiveness. All of which makes him an inspirational figure for 2021, his 100th year in movies.
His name, of course, is Zorro.
While Wonder Woman has lately been commanding media attention with her sentimental take on the power of positive thinking, Zorro commits to social action without losing his nimble sense of humour. He's just the kind of unifying hero this new year calls for, the key creation of a man who mastered chaos with laughter — the king of silent Hollywood, Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
It was Fairbanks who first turned this creature of the pulps into a towering legend. Fairbanks was the producer-star and uncredited co-writer of the 1920 box office smash The Mark of Zorro. Fairbanks introduced moviegoers to a Spanish aristocrat in 1820s California — a blue blood who believes in blue-state values: fair play for the poor and protection of the innocent.
The tale is simple: Girl meets outlaw and outlaw brings down government. The villain is an ambitious commandant who executes an amoral governor's orders by torturing priests, Indigenous peoples and peons, terrorizing the underclass and ruining righteous families, including the heroine's. He longs for her and she yearns for Zorro. Out of disguise, the masked outlaw who duels with a grin and woos with ardour morphs into blasé upper-cruster Don Diego Vega, who suffers from over-refinement and chronic fatigue.
Fairbanks and his collaborators (director Fred C. Niblo, co-writer Eugene Miller) alchemized Anglo pulp writer Johnston McCulley's 1919 serial The Curse of Capistrano into a jaunty epic about a master swordsman who funnels puckish humour and outrageous acrobatics into idealistic quests. Formulaic action scenes became riotous steeplechases as Zorro surmounted obstacles with somersaults and handsprings, sometimes pausing for a snack.
Like Alfred Tennyson's Sir Galahad, Zorro has the strength of 10 because his heart is pure. He's also irreverent and mischievous. His sparkle exudes hipness: He embraces the New World's egalitarian ethos while his enemies defend the feudal past.
Zorro lifted spirits in the 1920s. In the 2020s, his ebullience can generate ecstatic highs.
During Fairbanks's previous run as the parody hero of contemporary action comedies, fans came to think of him as “Doug,” a tribute to his offhand elegance — like Fred Astaire's, a triumph of talent and willpower. Doug transports this knockabout grace into The Mark of Zorro. With his light heart and “can-do” demeanour, Zorro soon dominated action-film iconography. Cinema would never be the same.
It both set a cinematic template for timeless champions like Robin Hood and pumped blood into the brave new pop-art form of adventure comics.
For a century, a steady succession of live-action and animated, big- and smallscreen Zorros of multiple nationalities — including Antonio Banderas, Tyrone Power, Alain Delon and Guy Williams — have stoked Zorro's popularity worldwide. He has conquered the imaginations of figures as different as the Chilean-Californian novelist Isabel Allende, who created an Indigenous origin story for him in Zorro (2005), and Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner, whose comic book Django/Zorro (collected as a graphic novel in 2015) depicts Black bounty hunter Django and an aging Diego teaming up to defeat a despotic Arizona empire-builder.
Zorro has outwitted avaricious governors, truculent men-at-arms and evil oligarchs trying to seize California's riches and foment discord between Mexico and the United States.
The movie-mad writers and artists who created the first comic books patterned superheroes after Fairbanks's dual roles. When Superman and Batman doffed their costumes to become Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, they revealed personae as ineffectual as Don Diego, the ennui-ridden, apolitical dandy who delights in playing parlour tricks with his handkerchief. Batman co-creator Bob Kane wrote in his 1998 autobiography Batman and Me: “The rich foppish Don Diego, Zorro's alter ego, inspired Bruce Wayne's facade of being a bored, wealthy idler and playboy.”
In The Mark of Zorro, Fairbanks has fun with the narrative mechanics that would change the pop landscape. Lois Lane spurning Clark Kent for Superman echoes beautiful noblewoman Lolita Pulido rejecting Don Diego and swooning for Zorro. Watching Zorro lead his stallion through camouflaged storm-cellar doors to an underground lair that connects via hidden passageways to Diego's hacienda, it's impossible not to think of Bruce Wayne speeding his Batmobile into a subterranean Batcave beneath Wayne Manor.
Fairbanks understood the need to surround a hero with archvillains like the cruel and petty Captain Ramon, allies like his swaggering fellow caballeros and semi-farcical characters in between, such as the bombastic Sergeant Gonzalez (who became endearing Sergeant Garcia in the Disney TV version).
In 1919, when McCulley conceived Zorro (Spanish for “fox”), the writer drew on fact-inspired legends like (of course) Robin Hood and the avenging bandido Murrieta, as well as novelist Baroness Orczy's entirely fictional Scarlet Pimpernel, the secret identity of the British popinjay who saves French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror. Fairbanks put a democratic spin on those influences. His Zorro dedicates himself to the equitable treatment of every citizen and rouses his fellow caballeros to practise a democratic form of noblesse oblige. Many today yearn for escapist heroes of Zorro's calibre. In our era of social dissolution, the timing could hardly be better for celebrating a homegrown icon of justice and bravery who exemplifies physical and mental dexterity and virtue — someone who stands for right making might.
He's just the kind of unifying hero this new year calls for.
— MICHAEL SRAGOW