There is now a fair understanding of the way that the fatuous Hollywood-centred account of silent cinema with which we all grew up falsified and deformed the history of cinema. The rediscovery of the great European films of the era have very effectively put paid to any such notion. What is perhaps less appreciated is the way that the history of US cinema itself was deformed by the simplistic picture painted of it and its genuine excellencies often obscured. No one has I think suffered more from this than Douglas Fairbanks.
Just as Chaplin found himself trapped in his role as "the little tramp" and Pickford imprisoned in eternal gnome-like childhood, so Fairbanks became, whether he would or no, the archetypal swashbuckler. The very selective survival of silent films almost entirely obfuscated the fact that it was not swashbucklers that first made Fairbanks a star but the sophisticated and often highly innovative comedies produced in the earlier period with John Emerson and one of the sharpest satirists of her time, Anita Loos. Now, with so many more available, we have at long last a truer picture of Fairbanks' career.
Fairbanks' style of comedy has much in common with that of the great French comedian, Max Linder (whose similarities with Chaplin are almost entirely superficial) and often shows, in its approach to the surreal, the influence of European style. Like Linder, Fairbanks tended to be a bit hit-and-miss (both were experimenters rather than perfectionists in the Chaplin manner) but the great films of this pre-swash period (The Mystery of the Leaping Fish 1916 or When the Clouds Roll By 1919 are my personal favourites) have a quality not really to be found elsewhere in US cinema. In saying this, I do not by any means intend to devalue the swashbucklers (Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro or The Thief of Bagdad remain classics and are themselves pervaded by the charming nonsensicality of the comedies) but rather to revalue the other Fairbanks that lay for so long ignored.
Allan Dwan who had made his way to Griffith's Fine Arts Film Company via a long stint at American Film Manufacturing Company, making mainly westerns and then with the Ince companies at about the time they were gobbled up by Universal. His image of Fairbanks was very much as an action hero and the combination Dwan-Loos that we have in this film is almost a perfect representation of the two ways in which the star was being pulled.
Amongst the various Dwan try-outs for Fairbanks was the politically correct western hero rather in the mould of William S. Hart (he and Fairbanks would even make a film entitled The Good Bad Man in 1916). This film is politically correct in another way too. The revisionist approach, with its very overt attack on racism and white supremacism, was not new (it had always been a significant element in the Ince westerns) even if it is here more outspoken than usual.
Even if the defence of Native Americans and Mexicans was less controversial in this respect than that of African Americans (and acceptable to Grifith), it was still of consuiderable importance in the face of the resurgence of white supremacism that followed Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The silent presence of an elegant black gambler in the saloon in this film is not, I think, insignificant amongst all the various minorities represented and contrasted with the miserable specimens of the "superior" white man. Similarly the parson's announced sermon on "intolerance" (never delivered) is obviously a nod to Griffith's better angel (several of the cast also appeared in the Griffith film). All in all the message is clear and, if a shade strident, is nonetheless important.
With the character of Nellie (Jewel Carmen), with her expensive education, "trained misunderstanding" of music and faultless taste in clothes, a sort of lily-white Lorelei Lee of the West, Loos comes into her own and the balance tips towards satire. The métisse Teresa (Alma Rubens) is on the other hand the free strong-minded female heroine that Loos offers as the counterpart in another political element of the story that invites the audience to see the white male treatment of women as comparable to that of its treatment of minorities.
The film is in the end neither the action film that Dwan might have preferred nor the satirical comedy that Loos could have written but a half-breed somewhere between the two. Yet, even if Dwan and Loos resembled each other only in their cynicism - of the three Fairbanks himself was the most idealistic - it does emerge as a surprisingly angry film at a moment when racist and anti-immigrant feeling was at its height in the US and still very much on the rise. The union of the two mixed race characters (Fairbanks and Rubens) is sometimes seen as an evasion of the racial issue but it does serve to underline the message stressed throughout the film that (in direct contradiction of Griffith's prologue to Birth of a Nation and to the fashionable eugenics of the day), it is "whiteness" that represents the problem in US society while the diversity represented by métissage is its redeeming feature.
But for Fairbanks personally it was neither the political nor the satirical aspects of the film that pointed the way forward but rather the forest idyll of the lovers with its incidental resemblance to Robin Hood. The swashbucklers, with some inevitability, proved ultimately a dead end for Fairbanks just as the "little girl" films did for his Hollywood queen and it proved impossible for him in later years, despite some not uninteresting attempts, to successfully either develop his potential as a dramatic actor nor to revive the great comedian he had once been. In Hollywood "when the legend becomes fact"......
Just as Chaplin found himself trapped in his role as "the little tramp" and Pickford imprisoned in eternal gnome-like childhood, so Fairbanks became, whether he would or no, the archetypal swashbuckler. The very selective survival of silent films almost entirely obfuscated the fact that it was not swashbucklers that first made Fairbanks a star but the sophisticated and often highly innovative comedies produced in the earlier period with John Emerson and one of the sharpest satirists of her time, Anita Loos. Now, with so many more available, we have at long last a truer picture of Fairbanks' career.
Fairbanks' style of comedy has much in common with that of the great French comedian, Max Linder (whose similarities with Chaplin are almost entirely superficial) and often shows, in its approach to the surreal, the influence of European style. Like Linder, Fairbanks tended to be a bit hit-and-miss (both were experimenters rather than perfectionists in the Chaplin manner) but the great films of this pre-swash period (The Mystery of the Leaping Fish 1916 or When the Clouds Roll By 1919 are my personal favourites) have a quality not really to be found elsewhere in US cinema. In saying this, I do not by any means intend to devalue the swashbucklers (Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro or The Thief of Bagdad remain classics and are themselves pervaded by the charming nonsensicality of the comedies) but rather to revalue the other Fairbanks that lay for so long ignored.
Allan Dwan who had made his way to Griffith's Fine Arts Film Company via a long stint at American Film Manufacturing Company, making mainly westerns and then with the Ince companies at about the time they were gobbled up by Universal. His image of Fairbanks was very much as an action hero and the combination Dwan-Loos that we have in this film is almost a perfect representation of the two ways in which the star was being pulled.
Amongst the various Dwan try-outs for Fairbanks was the politically correct western hero rather in the mould of William S. Hart (he and Fairbanks would even make a film entitled The Good Bad Man in 1916). This film is politically correct in another way too. The revisionist approach, with its very overt attack on racism and white supremacism, was not new (it had always been a significant element in the Ince westerns) even if it is here more outspoken than usual.
Even if the defence of Native Americans and Mexicans was less controversial in this respect than that of African Americans (and acceptable to Grifith), it was still of consuiderable importance in the face of the resurgence of white supremacism that followed Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The silent presence of an elegant black gambler in the saloon in this film is not, I think, insignificant amongst all the various minorities represented and contrasted with the miserable specimens of the "superior" white man. Similarly the parson's announced sermon on "intolerance" (never delivered) is obviously a nod to Griffith's better angel (several of the cast also appeared in the Griffith film). All in all the message is clear and, if a shade strident, is nonetheless important.
With the character of Nellie (Jewel Carmen), with her expensive education, "trained misunderstanding" of music and faultless taste in clothes, a sort of lily-white Lorelei Lee of the West, Loos comes into her own and the balance tips towards satire. The métisse Teresa (Alma Rubens) is on the other hand the free strong-minded female heroine that Loos offers as the counterpart in another political element of the story that invites the audience to see the white male treatment of women as comparable to that of its treatment of minorities.
The film is in the end neither the action film that Dwan might have preferred nor the satirical comedy that Loos could have written but a half-breed somewhere between the two. Yet, even if Dwan and Loos resembled each other only in their cynicism - of the three Fairbanks himself was the most idealistic - it does emerge as a surprisingly angry film at a moment when racist and anti-immigrant feeling was at its height in the US and still very much on the rise. The union of the two mixed race characters (Fairbanks and Rubens) is sometimes seen as an evasion of the racial issue but it does serve to underline the message stressed throughout the film that (in direct contradiction of Griffith's prologue to Birth of a Nation and to the fashionable eugenics of the day), it is "whiteness" that represents the problem in US society while the diversity represented by métissage is its redeeming feature.
But for Fairbanks personally it was neither the political nor the satirical aspects of the film that pointed the way forward but rather the forest idyll of the lovers with its incidental resemblance to Robin Hood. The swashbucklers, with some inevitability, proved ultimately a dead end for Fairbanks just as the "little girl" films did for his Hollywood queen and it proved impossible for him in later years, despite some not uninteresting attempts, to successfully either develop his potential as a dramatic actor nor to revive the great comedian he had once been. In Hollywood "when the legend becomes fact"......