The Mark of Zorro (4 page)

Fairbanks himself was forty-two when he played Don Cesar, but he was as lithe and athletic as ever. His low-budget 1920
Mark of Zorro
presented a reasonably faithful picture of the small, dusty adobe village that was Los Angeles in the early nineteenth century, but Fairbanks gave
Don Q, Son of Zarro,
set in Spain, with its castles and palaces, a far more expensive and elaborate look. Don Cesar is as dashing as his father but is less inclined to indulge in slapstick episodes in which he laughs uproariously while mocking his antagonists. The main innovation, which was added to most subsequent Zorro films, is Don Cesar's expertise with a bullwhip.

Fairbanks practiced with a whip until he became skilled enough to flick a cigarette out of someone's mouth or hand. Except for Tyrone Power, all subsequent Zorros were whip wielders, who sometimes lashed a Z on an enemy rather than slashing one with a sword, and who, by wrapping a whip around a tree branch, a protruding piece of architecture or piece of furniture, turned it into a rope to swing on. Unlike later second and third generation descendants of Zorro, Don Cesar does not wear a mask or impersonate Zorro, but he does become an outlaw after he is falsely accused of murdering an Austrian archduke visiting the court of Spain. Leaping backward out of a window, he plunges down a cliff into a swirling torrent far below and is thought to be dead. He then uses several disguises while clearing his name and sends for his father, who arrives in time to wield a sword in the final confrontation with the villainous Don Sebastian, played by Donald Crisp, the film's director.

The Zorro of films also blends the Western hero and the Latin lover. In Fairbanks's The Mark
of Zorro,
when Lolita disdainfully dismisses Don Diego after his limp courtship and goes into the garden to calm herself, Zorro, the masked outlaw, suddenly appears. Kissing her hand and arm and making passionate advances to her, he embodies the faintly dangerous sexuality of a stranger intruding in a forbidden garden. The garden itself, while having some resonances of Eden and Satanic temptation, more closely resembles a
hortus
conclusus,
the enclosed garden which was originally a cloister or hermitage. While the sense of religious retreat diminished after the Middle Ages, the enclosed garden still connotes a withdrawal from the world and a communion with nature, as well as purity and virginity. The outlaw in the garden plucking the rose, however romantically and politely, suggests violation.
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A similar scene occurs in
Don Q,
when Don Cesar encounters the ethereally beautiful Doña Dolores (Mary Astor) in the roof garden of her home. Like his father, although not behind a mask, he begins by making amorous advances to her as a courtly lover.

In the 1940
Mark of Zorro
and in the 1998
The Mask of Zorro,
the garden metamorphoses into an actual cloister. In 1940, frustrated by the ennui of Don Diego, who seems utterly uninterested in the marriage her uncle is trying to arrange, Lolita wanders into a chapel and encounters a priest, who is actually Zorro wearing a padre's robe, his face concealed beneath the cowl. When she tells him she is thinking of taking the veil, he responds that it would be a crime to lock away such beauty, whereupon a starry-eyed Lolita confesses her longing for a lover with the dash and gallantry of Zorro. She tries to look beneath the cowl, but he keeps retreating into the shadows. When she detects the tip of a rapier beneath the robe, she realizes that she has been talking to Zorro himself. Back in the garden, he fights with the guards and escapes over the wall. Similarly, in 1998, a less naive heroine goes to church to make her confession, about having lustful desires for a bandit, only to speak to Zorro himself, hiding this time not in costume and mask but in a confessional booth.

Both the Tyrone Power and Antonio Banderas films include an erotic dance. Power's Don Diego is asked to show Lolita one of the new dances of Spain, and as they perform a flamenco, he forgets about his languid persona, and, dressed in white with skin-tight pants like a matador, he performs with passion, fusing Zorro's forbidden sexuality with Diego's cosmopolitan elegance, so much so that Diego's own mask almost slips. He pulls back just in time, as Lolita says, “I never knew dancing could be so ...” and as she gropes for a word, Diego deflates her with, “Yes, it is fatiguing” and lapses back into his role. But shortly thereafter Zorro approaches her in her bedroom to tell her of his love. When the
alcalde
knocks, he hides on the balcony; the alcalde, suspicious, looks out only to see Don Diego. With a knowing leer, he leaves. Diego convinces the outraged Lolita, by repeating his words from the chapel scene, that he really is Zorro, and they embrace passionately. In
The Mask of Zorro,
Antonio Banderas disguises himself as an emissary from Spain to attend a party given by the heroine Elena's supposed father, the evil governor. The heroine has metamorphosed from Lolita's virginal
señorita
to a more liberated woman. Her dance with Zorro is extremely erotic, almost like that of the stereo-typical “Mexican spitfire,” the sensual “bad girl” of many a Western.

In the fifty-eight years between the Power and Banderas Zorro, the dangerous sexuality diminishes until it almost disappears. The Saturday matinee serials indulge in such nonstop action that they omit romance. Though both Guy Williams and Duncan Regher were tall, dark, and dashing as Zorro, the TV serials continued over such a long period of time that there is no opportunity for more than token romance, certainly not an intense one leading to marriage. While there is a love story in
The Three Swords of Zorro
(1963), Alain Delon's
Zorro
(1975), and
New World Zorro
(1990-94), love is not much more than a tame afterthought, and Delon leaves the heroine behind as he rides off into the sunset. The romantic exploits in Zorro, the Gay Blade (1980) are ludicrous. The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972) brings back the erotic element but replaces love with pornography. The major Zorro movies—the two Fairbankses, the Tyrone Power, and the Antonio Banderas—are also the ones in which Zorro is the dashing lover.

The Bold Caballero,
made in 1936 by Republic Pictures, a studio that specialized in action serials and low-budget Westerns, is the only movie that does not have Zorro in the title. It is notable as the first talking Zorro film and the first one in color. Though based on an idea by Johnston McCulley, it was written and directed by Wells Root, who took considerable liberties with the narrative. It takes place in Santa Cruz when Mexico was still governed by Spain and focuses on the oppression of the Indians. Robert Livingston played Don Diego and Zorro competently but without the acrobatics and panache of Fairbanks.

Republic turned Zorro into the hero of three serials and did four more Zorro imitation serials. In
Zorro Rides Again,
which takes place in the 1930s, John Carroll played James Vega, the great-grandson of Zorro. No longer does Zorro wear a cape and wield a sword. Though he does lots of horseback riding, he uses trains, planes, and automobiles and does a lot of singing.

Far better, arguably the best of all the Republic serials, is
Zorro's Fighting Legion
(1939). In it, Don Diego Vega visits Baja Mexico in 1824, shortly after its independence from Spain. Its president is Benito Juárez, a gross anachronism, since he did not become president until 1858. His democratic administration needs loyal men and gold in order to establish international credit, but a traitor on the ruling council impersonates the Yaqui Indian god Don del Oro in order to steal the gold and drive the Yaquis to rebel, overthrow the republic, and make him emperor. Promising to help Juárez, Zorro organizes a legion of
caballeros
(all of whom wear Zs on their cloaks and ride into action singing) to come to the rescue, prevent the theft of the gold, and uncover the villain. Each of its twelve installments ends with Zorro in deadly danger, but each time he manages a hair-breadth escape. Well photographed and acted, it has nonstop action, lots of swordplay, spectacular horsemanship, and sensational stunt work by the legendary Yakima Canutt. Zorro's escaping from pursuers by leaping his horse between two cliffs was copied in the Disney and New World Zorro television series. Reed Hadley, not only as the masked man of action but as the foppish, easily frightened Don Diego, gives what some critics have called the best combined performance of both Diego and Zorro, but the demands of the twelve-part film serial gave him virtually no romance.

Half a year after the last installment of
Zorro's Fighting Legion,
Twentieth Century Fox resurrected Zorro in a major production of
The Mark
of Zorro, with the studio's biggest star, Tyrone Power. Though he had cut a handsome figure in earlier costume films,
Zorro
was his first swashbuckler and in some ways his best. John Taintor Foote's witty screenplay retains McCulley's basic story but makes some significant changes. It begins in Madrid, where Don Diego Vega, called “the California cockerel,” is the star horseman and swordsman. Summoned home by his father, he finds that Don Alejandro has been deposed as alcalde of Los Angeles by the greedy and corrupt Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg), who has taken away the power of the old
hidalgos
and suppressed them with a military force headed by the sneering Captain Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone). In Spanish California, an
alcalde
was much more than a mayor; he had almost absolute power.
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Foote eliminated the evil governor and Captain Ramón. Gone also are Bernardo and the Polidos; Lolita (Linda Darnell) is now the niece of the new
alcalde.
Fray Felipe becomes Zorro's intermediary who receives recaptured tax money to be restored to the peasants. Unlike Captain Ramón, Captain Pasquale does not lust after Lolita; instead, he has designs on the
alcalde's
wife, who in turn flirts with Don Diego.

The Mark of
Zorro
invokes a great deal of humor and satire as Diego alternates between swishing and swashing. The audience relishes being in on a secret that everyone else fails to perceive. Power proved himself skilled at drawing-room comedy, mincing about with a lace handkerchief, a lorgnette, and a snuff box, as well as being a dashing adventurer, and gave what most critics consider the best performance of all the Don Diegos. Power was not the acrobat that Fairbanks was, but he was a better actor, younger—twenty-six to Fairbanks's thirty-seven (in the novel Zorro is twenty-four)—handsomer, and an excellent horseman. His duel with Basil Rathbone is considered one of the finest on film, done authentically without the leaping about on furniture and swinging on chandeliers by which too many movie heroes leave themselves off balance and off guard. Rathbone, acclaimed as an expert fencer, acknowledged that “Power was the most agile man with a sword I've ever faced before a camera. Tyrone could have fenced Errol Flynn into a cocked hat.”
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The subsequent Zorro films began to borrow from each other. A touch that has been added to many later Zorro films takes place just before the duel, when Captain Pasquale slashes the top off a candle. Don Diego then slashes another candle, which he seems to miss. “Hah!” sneers Pasquale. “Hah, hah,” mocks Don Diego as he lifts the candle top which he has severed without seeming to touch it. (Rathbone later parodied this scene in The Court Jester with Danny Kaye.) Another recurring touch is for Zorro at the end to hurl his sword into the ceiling and let it hang there until he needs it again. Fairbanks had hurled his into the wall, and later Zorros have done one or the other. Yet another is for Zorro to leave someone blindfolded with a sword point or a pistol balanced against him so that he thinks he is still menaced by Zorro.

Alfred Newman provided a stirring score for the 1940 film, and Rouben Mamoulian directed with a fine flair for action, comedy, and visual effects. Looking at pictures of the original small and dusty Los Angeles pueblo, he declared that it would not do and provided sumptuous sets for the aristocrats, while leaving the peons (all dressed in standard white pyjamas, having a siesta or standing beneath a sea of
sombreros,
as in a Diego Rivera painting) to inhabit the dusty remainder of the community. As a practical matter of filming, interior rooms did have to be exaggerated in size to provide enough space for a duel. And there are often multiple participants in sword fights.
The Mark of Zorro
was one of the hits of 1940 and remains one of the half dozen most durable and satisfying of all swashbucklers.

After its success, Zorro briefly declined into serials. He is not even in Zorro's
Black Whip
(1944), which features a masked, black-clad whip-wielding woman. The protagonist of
The Son of Zorro
(1947) is not the son but claims Zorro ancestry on his mother's side.
The Ghost of Zorro
(1949) is a cowboy Western starring Clayton Moore (who later played the Lone Ranger) as Ken Munson, a grandson of Zorro.

The Zorro fondly remembered by the baby-boomer generation is Guy Williams, who starred in two seasons of
Zorro
presented by Walt Disney on ABC in 1957-1958 and 1958-1959 for a total of seventy-eight half-hour episodes. Born Armando Catalano, Guy Williams grew up in a family of Italian immigrant fencers. Six feet three inches tall, with a thin moustache and a dazzling smile, he looked the part and was chosen for the lead. The opening episode, set in 1820 in Spanish California, pretty much follows the opening of the Power film, with Don Diego returning from Spain to find his father deposed by a despot, but thereafter, the scripts invented new material, introduced new characters, and altered some others. Some plots were taken from McCulley's short stories and novellas in the magazines. The fencing master was Fred Cavens, who had coached every Zorro since Douglas Fairbanks.

One of the most popular characters was Sergeant Garcia, the fat, foolish second in command, whose good nature makes him reluctant to carry out the orders of the vicious
commandante.
Garcia does not appear in McCulley's original novel, but the author developed him in short stories in the 1940s as the bewildered buffoon, fat, bumbling, and bibulous with whom Don Diego develops a friendship, and this is the character in the Disney series. As played by Henry Calvin, he was fond of drink and would burst into song when he had had too much.