The Mark of Zorro (1920)

The Mark of Zorro (1920) bore many resemblances to Griffith’s Ramona. Starring Douglas Fairbanks as the mysterious “Castilian” hero, the film was directed by Fred Niblo, produced by the Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, and distributed by United Artists, the company Fairbanks co-owned with D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin. Based on a 1919 short story “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCully, the screenplay was originally credited to Eugene Miller and has since been credited to Elton Thomas, a pseudonym of Douglas Fairbanks. Like Ramona, the story of Zorro has had tremendous staying power. Following a decade in which the image of Mexicans in Hollywood films was largely based on the shifting American allegiances during the Mexican Revolution or on blatant racism, The Mark of Zorro represented a return to the mythological past of pre-1846 California. The reference to Capistrano, the most famed of the Spanish missions of Old California, was credited at the beginning of the film and firmly established the mission-era setting and plot. Whereas Ramona portrayed Mexican characters physically unable to protect their women from Anglo encroachment, The Mark of Zorro featured a corrupt Mexican government morally unable to protect its own citizens. Inter-titles near the beginning of the film instruct the viewer about the “greedy, licentious, and arrogant” military and government who declare that Zorro, as protector of the poor and native Mexican, poses the threat of rebellion. The governor personally vows to capture the mysterious bandit. The shift away from the explicitly derogatory “Greaser” films of the 1910s to a more complex representation of Mexican nationality was in part influenced by rising protest from the Mexican government following the election of Venustiano Carranza and drafting of the Mexican Constitution in 1917. As Helen Delpar points out, the shift also reflects the increased distribution of Hollywood films into Mexico following World War I, as the French film industry that had previously dominated the Mexican market was devastated during the war. In addition, the 1920s featured the rise of the Mexican American as a consumer of Hollywood films, especially in Los Angeles and San Diego, where, “as in [Anglo] American families, movie tickets were an essential feature of these Mexican families’ spending ways” (George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, p.173). The increased purchasing power of Mexican Americans may have affected the types of Mexican characters portrayed by Hollywood. The Mark of Zorro was notable, however, in that the “noble-blooded” Zorro was a bandit hero in the model of Joaquin Murrieta, the “Mexican Robin Hood” of Gold Rush-era California. Murrieta is a complex figure in Mexican culture, and has represented a wide breadth of political ideologies and factions—seen as both a leader of the resistance to Anglo encroachment in 1840s California and as a representative of the tyranny during the Mexican Revolution. Just as Zorro is described in the film, Murrieta appears in Mexican letters “like a graveyard ghost and like a ghost he disappears.” Jose Vasconcelos, the former Secretary of Public Education and director of the National University of Mexico (who had procured public subsidies for the murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros), wrote a 1944 essay called “The Tragedy of California” that expressed a nostalgic reading of Murrieta as defender of the people while at the same time demonstrated his keen disillusionment with the Mexican Revolution. In the essay he compares Murrieta’s descent into banditry and terrorism with the actions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, who he claimed had manipulated the “Mexican lower classes” into revolt against wealthy hacienda owners, only to find United States banks buying up the “despoiled” Mexican lands. Like the folk tales about Joaquin Murrieta, The Mark of Zorro offered an intertwined interpretation of both the Mexican-American War and Mexican Revolution in which the bandit hero represented simultaneous and contradictory factions. Douglas Fairbanks’ performance as Zorro presented audiences in 1920-21 with a simultaneously comic but sexualized body through which these tangled and ambiguous history lessons were viewed. In the story on which the film is based, the lead character shares a double-identity as both Don Diego Vega, the elite and effete son of a noble Spanish family, whose languid mannerisms and lingering bachelorhood cause the consternation of his father and the rejection of his would-be marriage partner Lolita Pulido and as the masked and adventurous Zorro, whose righteous defense of the poor and masculine sexuality make him the object of respect and desire by his father and love interest alike. The film’s denouement, however, introduces a third persona to the lead character, as an unmasked Zorro (and non-effete Diego Vega) fights the rival Captain Ramon: the acrobatic swordfight at the film’s end is clearly won by Fairbanks himself, whose considerable celebrity made him easily recognizable to the audience and all the more attractive to the film’s (Pickford lookalike) heroine. Reviewers at the time took this “triangular” construct as rather matter of fact. In the March 1921 issue of Photoplay, Burns Mantle wrote that Fairbanks was graceful and thrilling as the “romantic hero, who is the alleged weakling son of a Mexican don, but who doubles at odd moments, and especially at night, as a bandit set on freeing the people of his state from the oppression of their political rulers . . . and in the end rescues the trusting heroine . . . as ever the knights of old.” By commenting on Zorro’s nighttime escapades as both revolutionary hero and sexual conqueror, Mantle expanded upon image of Zorro as weakling son/Murrieta figure while at the same time noting that Fairbanks, as a major Hollywood star, provided for American audiences the romantic idol that the dark-skinned Murrieta, Villa, and Zapata could not. But not all contemporary reviewers agreed with Mantle’s assessment. Other reviewers commented on this triangulation in rather negative terms. Upon the film’s release at the Capitol Theater, the New York Times wrote that Fairbanks was more of an “athletic comedian” than romantic hero, and that The Mark of Zorro sacrificed “plausibility . . . for headlong action.” Not only did the film contain too much “romantic nonsense,” but the casting of Fairbanks as the Mexican “stranger with a sure sword, swift horse, and a sense of humor” was directly questioned by the Times. They wrote that the film’s picturesque settings often contrasted “amusingly with the emphatically non-Spanish appearance of some of the players, including, of course, Fairbanks himself.”Although Fairbanks’ own appearance was distracting to some contemporary reviewers, it successfully confirmed the pure Spanish blood of Zorro, the Mexican romantic bandit hero. As an unmasked Zorro (now clearly representing Fairbanks himself) warned the corrupt politicians at the end of the film, “here your abuse of power ends. Every Californian of noble blood stand with me.” After declaring “Justice for All!,” Fairbanks acrobatically leaps to the balcony above him where Marguerite de la Motte, as the pale-skinned Lolita Pulido, awaits. De la Motte, a close friend of Fairbanks and Pickford, tells him “You talk, you fight, you look like Zorro!” to which he replies “And I love like Zorro.” To a crowd of cheering onlookers below, Fairbanks and de la Motte (as a stand-in for Pickford) feign a comic and bashful kiss in the same exaggerated manner with which Pickford and Fairbanks entertained the American public in “real” life. Celebrity and narrative functioned simultaneously at the end of the film, and Zorro and Fairbanks cannot be separated from one another. Mexican folk heroes were white Hollywood stars. When Fairbanks returned to the Latin hero in The Gaucho (1927), he did so as a darker-skinned, more sexualized, and more exotic figure. The image of Fairbanks presented in this later film comments on the development and death of Hollywood icon Rudolph Valentino, whose Arabian and Latin characters in the mid-1920s were in many ways re-workings of this Fairbanks’ performance as Zorro.