The Mark of Zorro (1920)

Directed by

Fred Niblo

Genre

swashbuckler film, silent film, adventure film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 31m

Rated

NR

Rating

7.2 of 10 from 76 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A wealthy young man secretly fights injustice as a masked outlaw in old California. He must protect his family and win the love of a noblewoman while opposing a corrupt governor.

energeticromanticswashbucklingplayfulheroicfast-pacedlighthearteddashing

What happens

The Mark of Zorro is a 1920 American silent Western romance film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Noah Beery. This genre-defining swashbuckler adventure was the first movie version of The Mark of Zorro. Based on the 1919 story The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, which introduced the masked hero, Zorro, the screenplay was adapted by Fairbanks (as "Elton Thomas") and Eugene Miller. Zorro is a character reminiscent of Baroness Orczy's masked hero The Scarlet Pimpernel. The film was produced by Fairbanks for his own production company, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, and was the first film released through United Artists, the company formed by Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. Noah Beery Jr. makes his first of many dozens of screen appearances, portraying a young child. His father began sporadically billing himself as Noah Beery Sr. as a result. The film has been remade twice, once in 1940 (starring Tyrone Power) and again in 1974 (starring Frank Langella). In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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