Critic's Choice - New DVDs - ‘Douglas Fairbanks - A Modern Musketeer’ - Review - NYTimes.com
notes on my most famous (supposed) relative...
Critic's Choice - New DVDs - ‘Douglas Fairbanks - A Modern Musketeer’ - Review - NYTimes.com
It’s no coincidence that MoMA chose to begin its version of film history with these two figures: if Griffith was the first modern filmmaker, then Fairbanks was a plausible candidate as the first modern movie star. With his boundless energy and incandescent smile, Fairbanks counts among the earliest major performers to emerge, not from the one- and two-reel films that had been the norm in the nickelodeon days, but from the feature-length film as it began to develop around 1912.
...
This is the performer whose development is traced in “Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer,” an extraordinary, well-produced set of 10 features and one short film that arrives on Tuesday from Flicker Alley. These aren’t the more familiar costume epics from Fairbanks’s later career — several of which have been issued in fine editions by Kino International — but rather the modern-day comedies that first established his screen personality.
...
For Fairbanks, a dedicated amateur gymnast, such moments of physical exuberance came naturally. On “His Picture” he was teamed for the first time with the director John Emerson and the screenwriter Anita Loos (the future author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), and their collaboration extended through eight more films, three of which are included here: “The Mystery of the Leaping Fish,” a bizarre short with Fairbanks as a drug-addled detective named Coke Ennyday; the western comedy “Wild and Woolly”; and the Ruritanian adventure “Reaching for the Moon.”
Working with Emerson and Loos, Fairbanks (who contributed substantially to his own scripts, often under the pseudonym Elton Thomas) elaborated the character audiences came to call “Doug”: an energetic striver, of middle- or upper-middle-class origins, whose romantic notions and passionate enthusiasms (for the cowboy life in “Wild and Woolly,” or a fantasy of royal origins in “Reaching”) are first presented as comic but ultimately allow him to save the day.
...
With “Zorro,” Fairbanks inverted his successful formula. No longer was he an ordinary individual who dreamed of being a hero, but a hero (Zorro, the masked scourge of corrupt officials in Colonial California) who disguised himself as an average guy (Don Diego, the foppish son of a landowner). The reversal, of course, only made the fantasy seem more potent: “Zorro” began a line of superheroes with secret identities that remains very much (perhaps too much) with us today.
Critic's Choice - New DVDs - ‘Douglas Fairbanks - A Modern Musketeer’ - Review - NYTimes.com
It’s no coincidence that MoMA chose to begin its version of film history with these two figures: if Griffith was the first modern filmmaker, then Fairbanks was a plausible candidate as the first modern movie star. With his boundless energy and incandescent smile, Fairbanks counts among the earliest major performers to emerge, not from the one- and two-reel films that had been the norm in the nickelodeon days, but from the feature-length film as it began to develop around 1912.
...
This is the performer whose development is traced in “Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer,” an extraordinary, well-produced set of 10 features and one short film that arrives on Tuesday from Flicker Alley. These aren’t the more familiar costume epics from Fairbanks’s later career — several of which have been issued in fine editions by Kino International — but rather the modern-day comedies that first established his screen personality.
...
For Fairbanks, a dedicated amateur gymnast, such moments of physical exuberance came naturally. On “His Picture” he was teamed for the first time with the director John Emerson and the screenwriter Anita Loos (the future author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), and their collaboration extended through eight more films, three of which are included here: “The Mystery of the Leaping Fish,” a bizarre short with Fairbanks as a drug-addled detective named Coke Ennyday; the western comedy “Wild and Woolly”; and the Ruritanian adventure “Reaching for the Moon.”
Working with Emerson and Loos, Fairbanks (who contributed substantially to his own scripts, often under the pseudonym Elton Thomas) elaborated the character audiences came to call “Doug”: an energetic striver, of middle- or upper-middle-class origins, whose romantic notions and passionate enthusiasms (for the cowboy life in “Wild and Woolly,” or a fantasy of royal origins in “Reaching”) are first presented as comic but ultimately allow him to save the day.
...
With “Zorro,” Fairbanks inverted his successful formula. No longer was he an ordinary individual who dreamed of being a hero, but a hero (Zorro, the masked scourge of corrupt officials in Colonial California) who disguised himself as an average guy (Don Diego, the foppish son of a landowner). The reversal, of course, only made the fantasy seem more potent: “Zorro” began a line of superheroes with secret identities that remains very much (perhaps too much) with us today.
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