Continuing this little survey of sword fights in movies that we began yesterday, I thought it might put things in context to look at what is generally considered the first great sword fight in movie history–Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in ‘The Mark Of Zorro’ (1920). There probably were sword fights in movies prior to this but the immense success of this movie and Fairbanks’s quick ascent to massive stardom made this the gold standard by which all sword fights were measured by for many years.

Now, despite my love for most everything 1920s, I’m not really a silent movie guy (Chaplin and Keaton exempted). So I approached this with a bit of trepidation–what, after all, is a sword fight without the metallic clanging and scraping of the swords? And it turns out I was right, though the lack of sound is the least of the problems. The scene is flatly shot, the heroine keeps running around and getting in the way, and the whole thing is worlds away dynamically from what sword fights in movies would be a decade and a half later. But that’s simply the truth about movies, isn’t it? They date. Oh how they date! Every twenty years it seems like whatever was considered sophisticated filmmaking gets flushed down the toilet due to looking hopelessly old-fashioned. Just as it’s hard to grasp what passed for great acting in the early 1930s when it’s now palpably hammy and unbelievable, it’s impossible to put ourselves in the shoes of an audience in 1920 and see what they found thrilling about this particular sword fight., But thrill they did. The movie was remade twenty years later with Tyrone Power and one might expect that the sword fight was improved upon. You’ll have to come back tomorrow and see for yourself…