The Black Pirate (1926)
If Warner Bros. put out this film, it would be dark and terrifying. All the gritty awful moments, like a pirate casually sticking the sword into his victim, would be unwatchable. And it would have been in cold black and white.
But this is a Douglas Fairbanks film, and in his world, which he controlled in this movie completely (his own Elton Corporation funded it), everything must be cheery. Even when the cast is made of the lowest kind of pirate. "The Black Pirate" is almost a satire right from the title, and it's shot in two-color Technicolor which gives it a rather nice, low-key tinted appearance, and of course our black pirate is not black in skin or in spirit. As his antics and smiles win over this motley crew, it has to be something like a comedy, except for its other sense of high drama and heroism.
Optimism always wins, so you know at the start how it ends. What you don't know is what clever tricks, and physical feats, and twists of plot, will be called to arms to get there. Fairbanks from the 21st Century has become a kind of caricature, something the great comics avoided. Watch a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton comedy, and the leads are never characters to laugh at, but here, in the theater I just watched this in, there was a kind of appreciative mockery in the laughter, like, "Here he goes again." And he does "go again" up the rigging and down sails and in underwater heroics.
If you haven't seen a Fairbanks, movie, this is a good one to start with. It never slows down, and you really can appreciate the fun, the pure fun, that Fairbanks the actor and producer guaranteed his pre-Depression audiences.
If Warner Bros. put out this film, it would be dark and terrifying. All the gritty awful moments, like a pirate casually sticking the sword into his victim, would be unwatchable. And it would have been in cold black and white.
But this is a Douglas Fairbanks film, and in his world, which he controlled in this movie completely (his own Elton Corporation funded it), everything must be cheery. Even when the cast is made of the lowest kind of pirate. "The Black Pirate" is almost a satire right from the title, and it's shot in two-color Technicolor which gives it a rather nice, low-key tinted appearance, and of course our black pirate is not black in skin or in spirit. As his antics and smiles win over this motley crew, it has to be something like a comedy, except for its other sense of high drama and heroism.
Optimism always wins, so you know at the start how it ends. What you don't know is what clever tricks, and physical feats, and twists of plot, will be called to arms to get there. Fairbanks from the 21st Century has become a kind of caricature, something the great comics avoided. Watch a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton comedy, and the leads are never characters to laugh at, but here, in the theater I just watched this in, there was a kind of appreciative mockery in the laughter, like, "Here he goes again." And he does "go again" up the rigging and down sails and in underwater heroics.
If you haven't seen a Fairbanks, movie, this is a good one to start with. It never slows down, and you really can appreciate the fun, the pure fun, that Fairbanks the actor and producer guaranteed his pre-Depression audiences.