Why I Love Doug!

Doug, how do I love you?

Let me ponder the ways.

I love you for your sheer enjoyment of making movies. Whether early silents like Mystery of the Leaping Fish or The Modern Musketeer or your later ones, when you really hit your stride, I've said it before and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll say it again, no one seemed to love making movies as much as Doug.

He starts to really hit his stride with The Mark of Zorro. Last night's print on TCM was beautifull

y restored and tinted by David Shepard and Flicker Alley with a tremendous score by Mont Alto Orchestra. But here we see the furthering of the Fairbanks hero started in Modern Musketeer. Devilish and most of all, acrobatic to the nth degree, in Zorro, he runs rings around his adversaries. I saw this years ago on the big screen (but not in nearly as grand print as last night) at the Silent Movie Theater here in the City of Angels.

His next adventure film would be again with Fred Niblo, The Three Musketeers which, sadly, I haven't seen. It is on my wish list of films to see on the big screen and I have only heard wonderful things about the film and especially Fairbanks' swashbuckling.

He followed that with Robin Hood working with director Allan Dwan. Dwan was an engineer at heart and made possible many of Doug's famous stunts in this film. The set was constructed on the United Artist lot in what was then considered west Hollywood (Santa Monica and La Brea). At that time, it was the largest set constructed in Hollywood. The lot changed hands over the years becoming among others, the Goldwyn Lot and the Warner Hollywood lot. Today, it is a large shopping mall with the Formosa Cafe all that really remains of its classic era roots.

Fairbanks seems to have had an affinity with larger than life directors. Dwan, as I said was an engineer at heart, who shared Doug's joy in pushing the outside of the envelop in terms of dare-devil stunts. His next director was Raoul Walsh. Walsh had started as an actor in silent films with D.W. Griffith. He had gotten bored with acting and had a series of adventures (as well as being a hard drinking kind of guy) that ultimately took him south of the border with Pancho Villa.

He managed to funnel all of that into his directing. His turn with Doug brought forth the magical The Thief of Bagdad.

He next teamed with Albert Parker for The Black Pirate. Parts of Pirate were shot in 2-stripe Techincolor and are beautiful to behold. Most of the stunts, however, are reproductions of what Dwan and Fairbanks did in Robin Hood.

He closes out the silent era with the wonderful The Iron Mask working again with Allan Dwan, perhaps the director that best understood how to use his athletic prowess.

I saw this two months ago at a screening at the Academy, intro'd by Kevin Brownlow. Watching the film, I was reminded of Fairbank's comment in Brownlow's wonderful documentary Hollywood that "the romance of film making ends here."

And for Fairbanks, by then in his forties, it really truly seems to have. He made a few talkie films but they never had the verve and just plain joie de vivre that his silents did.

He wrote the stories to many of his best films but at heart, he seems to have loved playing the hero that wows us with his athleticism.

Errol Flynn may have come close with his swordmanship but he lacked Doug's physical grace in big stunts.

We would not really see his like again in film until Burt Lancaster made a series of pirate films in the 1950s.

I continue to hope that TCM will obtain the rights to air Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers and The Iron Mask along with their line-up of Thief and Zorro

I love Doug.