It seems that any beautiful woman that was available for work in the British cinema got cast at least as an extra for either the opulent funeral scene or as part of the audience when his life is performed as a play. "Every man is Don Juan when the bulls are running in Seville", a law enforcement officer tells Douglas Fairbanks when he's arrested for creating a disturbance, nobody believing that he is indeed Don Juan. Some young upstart had pretended to be Don Juan, and ended up being killed in a sword fight by a jealous husband. So suffering from aging male issues (probably gout), Fairbanks retires to the country after witnessing a glorious funeral and planning a comeback. But his efforts to romance women in the country don't succeed as well, and when he returns to Seville, he finds that the image that he thought he had has been replaced by something else and lovers don't even recognize him.
This is played as if it was something out of the comedy Francais, exaggerated and purposely overacted. Merle Oberon plays the castanet clicking dancer with a fiery temper who believes herself to be his greatest love, and at the funeral gets into a catfight with the very similar Benita Hume. In the country, Fairbanks finds that for him, a night of love will cost him, and he's not used to that. His fragile ego has him go mad with narcissistic fury over the legend that has been built. You have to take this one for what it is, basically a parody of the type of role that Fairbanks had played in the silent movies that he was now making fun of himself for being much older than he had been for delightful swashbuckler adventures like "The Thief of Baghdad" and "The Black Pirate". So as a pastiche of those types of movies, as his last film, it's a must. Entertaining but a bit pretentious.
This is played as if it was something out of the comedy Francais, exaggerated and purposely overacted. Merle Oberon plays the castanet clicking dancer with a fiery temper who believes herself to be his greatest love, and at the funeral gets into a catfight with the very similar Benita Hume. In the country, Fairbanks finds that for him, a night of love will cost him, and he's not used to that. His fragile ego has him go mad with narcissistic fury over the legend that has been built. You have to take this one for what it is, basically a parody of the type of role that Fairbanks had played in the silent movies that he was now making fun of himself for being much older than he had been for delightful swashbuckler adventures like "The Thief of Baghdad" and "The Black Pirate". So as a pastiche of those types of movies, as his last film, it's a must. Entertaining but a bit pretentious.