Gosh darn it--I watched them in the wrong order!!!

I'm a big fan of the silent movie swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. So when The Iron Mask (1929), came up as a suggested movie for me on Netflix, it was with some embarrassment that I realized I had never seen either it or Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers (1921).

So I popped The Iron Mask to the top of my Netflix list and watched it a few days later when the disc arrived. It proved to be an energetic and interesting adaptation of Dumas' classic novel. Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers, like most movie versions, used just the first half of the novel as its story, so this sequel was able to incorporate events from the second half of that novel with elements from The Man in the Iron Mask. It also came out right at the beginning of the sound era--so, though it is still a silent film, D'Artagnan is given a couple of short speeches: a prologue and another speech later on to help bridge a twenty year jump in time.


The next movie I got from Netflix was indeed Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers.  Loved that one, too. Especially the fight between the Musketeers and Cardinal's Guards, with D'Artagnan at one point doing a really cool somersault over a Guard to take him down and save Aramis' life.

But, gosh darn it, I therefore watched them in the wrong order!! I hate it when that happens. Oh, well, I'll watch 'em again one day and make sure I get them in the right order.And, of course, it really doesn't matter at all. It's not as if I'm not already intimately familiar with both stories. But that's the way my mind works--I gotta watch stuff in order. I just gotta.

DECADE BY DECADE, Part 1: The First Swash Ever Buckled.

This series will walk us from the 1920s through the 1970s, taking a look at one book, one comic book (meaning a specific issue rather than a series), one movie and one radio show from each decade.

But in the 1920s, comic books featuring original stories weren’t yet around. (Early comic books reprinted newspaper strips; comic books with new stories weren’t regularly published until the mid-1930s.) Commercial radio was in its infancy, with little if any of what was produced in the 1920s surviving today.

So for this first decade, we’ll discuss one movie and one book. Comics and radio will be added when we get to the 1930s.


The Black Pirate (1926) starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.—the father of the swashbuckler. Few other actors, in fact, have buckled swashes with the same flair and style as Fairbanks. A skilled athlete and acrobat, he performed some amazing stunts over the course of his career in silent films.

In The Black Pirate, Fairbanks plays a man who joins up with the pirates that had killed his father—secretly planning on destroying the band. Along the way, he also takes time to fall in love with the lovely damsel that the pirates have taken prisoner.

The plot is perfectly serviceable in terms of story, but its main purpose is to set up the various action set-pieces that allow Fairbanks to be suitably heroic. Most notable is a sequence in which he captures a merchant ship single-handedly. At the movie’s climax, there’s an extraordinary scene in which a crew of seaman swim underneath the pirate ship in order to board it unexpectedly from the other side.

An early color film, The Black Pirate remains an entertaining and visually striking film to this day. It’s an interesting bit of film history in that it introduced many of the elements that would become clichés of the genre. But it’s also an example of great storytelling; Fairbanks was perfectly at home within the silent film genre (his high-pitched voice pretty much ended his career with the advent of sound) and his wonderful stunts are as good as any you might see in a modern movie. Besides, all those old sailing ships appearing throughout the movie are just plain cool to look at.