Douglas Fairbanks became a star in comedies and Westerns between 1915 and 1919, but his legacy wasn't secured until the release of his first swashbuckler, 1920's The Mark Of Zorro. The movie was such a hit that Fairbanks spent the rest of the silent era writing, producing, and starring in blockbuster adaptations of literary adventures, making roughly one a year. The Douglas Fairbanks Collection contains the first six, on five DVDs: The Mark Of Zorro plus The Three Musketeers (1921), Robin Hood (1922), The Thief Of Bagdad (1924), Don Q, Son Of Zorro (1925), and The Black Pirate (1926).
With the exception of The Thief Of Bagdad, they aren't really superior cinema; they're slackly paced and geared toward showing off elaborate sets and armies of extras. But each of the films has its fascinations: The Black Pirate's surprisingly vivid two-strip Technicolor and stunts, Robin Hood's lengthy Crusades backstory, the way The Three Musketeers presages Richard Lester's 1973 version. Pop scholars should also enjoy spotting the connections between Zorro and Bob Kane's later Batman, and noting how Fairbanks hedged his bets on The Mark Of Zorro by inserting wry physical comedy as Zorro's foppish alter ego.
The DVDs include a smattering of extras, the best being Rudy Behlmer's commentary on The Black Pirate and the introductions for The Mark Of Zorro and The Thief Of Bagdad that Orson Welles wrote and delivered for the PBS series The Silent Years back in 1971. The image quality throughout is fairly shoddy, though, and a few of the re-recorded scores—especially Robin Hood's—sound distractingly rinky-dink. The exception, again, is The Thief Of Bagdad, an all-around winner. Its lavish and evocative orchestral score matches Raoul Walsh's vigorous direction and the eye-poppingly inventive matte effects, which pack nearly every frame with incidental wonder.
As for Fairbanks, in all these features, he's a live wire. More doughy and goggle-eyed than movie-star handsome, Fairbanks made up for his plainness by hopping around sets with the exuberance and creativity of a young Jackie Chan. He was hammy, yes, but his gift was his ability to look comfortable in period dress or casual wear, whether making bold leaps or delighting in the subtlety of a sigh.