O Máscara de Ferro

Seven stars. My twelve year-old son and I both LOVE Douglass Fairbanks. I showed him Zorro when he was about four, and he's been hooked ever since. But this one was a bit of a let-down. I guess Fairbanks was finally starting to get too old to pull off the sort of stunts that litter films like Zorro, The Three Musketeers, The Black Pirate, and Thief of Bagdad. There are the occasional nuggets, and the film is still chock full of bravura action sequences. But it's a film about the inevitable consequence of aging, even if it's done up in Hollywood gloss. This film was made at the cusp of the arrival of talkies, and features intro and entr'acte sequences with Fairbanks, as D'Artagnan, talking to the audience. That provided a fun opportunity for me to discuss the limitations of early sound technology with my son, and about why big spectacle films stayed silent longer than small-scene dramas. Anyway. The film is a combo of the Dumas novels Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask, using both to put a more upbeat spin on the later novel. It has excellent production values, and a solid cast. The acting is first-rate silent film acting -- everything HAS to be big to work, and it is. The stunts are well-done, if not breath taking. It works best if seen as a sort of coda to the stuff Fairbanks had been doing so brilliantly for the previous dozen years or so. 8 November 2021.