Last year, I was fortunate enough to see this classic—not
in one of those cheaply made versions in the public domain, but restored with
beautiful original color tinting, and put on the big screen by the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ.
Film technology has advanced markedly in the last
century, but Fairbanks’ good looks, charm and charisma remained timeless for
those of us in the packed auditorium that night.
All these qualities helped Fairbanks virtually create
the template for the cinematic swashbuckling hero. Yes, sword fights and period
costumes are required for the genre, but above all, you need a devil-may-care
protagonist who is good at heart, and open to love by a woman.
That was the formula already fashioned by Fairbanks
from the start of the Roaring Twenties, in The Mark of Zorro, The
Three Musketeers, and Robin Hood, and it would continue to be
through the end of the decade.
Matinee idols of the studio system in the sound
era—Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Burt Lancaster, and Stewart Granger—owed much of
their early success to vehicles patterned after his. But what they accomplished
in those movies don’t measure up to the standards set by Fairbanks.
Why? It doesn’t necessarily have to do with skill.
(Lancaster, of course, eventually won an Oscar, and Flynn and Power were also
recognized as quite capable late in their careers.)
Rather, it’s because Fairbanks as an independent
producer (and as part of the group that formed United Artists in 1919, with
wife Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith) generated his own films
and image—engaging the financing, writing the stories (in this case, with a nom
de plume derived from his middle names, “Elton Thomas”), and explaining to
collaborators what he wanted through his elaborate charts.
In short, Fairbanks had become what later film
scholars would term an “auteur”: a filmmaker whose artistic control over the
product is so great that he is, practically speaking, its “author.”
Director Raoul Walsh, in one of his greatest
silent films, gave ample evidence of the energy and panache of his Warner
Brothers movies of the sound era.
But it was a professional he had worked with on the
East Coast, in a Fort Lee film studio, art director William Cameron Menzies
(later to direct Things to Come and to design Gone With the Wind),
along with special effects mavens Hampton Del Ruth and Coy Watson and the star's own brother Robert, serving as technical director, whom
Fairbanks called on for most of the movie’s most prodigious feats of cinematic
magic, including:
* a fire-breathing dragon (a crocodile shot with the
actor using double-exposure);
*a giant spider;
*a flying horse, featuring a real horse running on a
treadmill against a screen;
*the underworld mermaid kingdom, shot through a curtain
of thin gauze as if the Thief were swimming underwater, then tinted blue in
post-production;
*an invisibility cloak;
* the famous flying “magic carpet,” which Walsh
claimed to have conceived while watching a steelworker hoisted aloft on a
crane—but which still required a 3/4 inch piece of steel, along with 16 piano
wires fastened to the carpet’s corners and anchored to the top of a 100-ft.
construction crane.
The intricate sets also reflected its star’s precise
calculations for his stunts, according to Laura Boyes’ July 2023 post on her “Moviediva” blog: “Props were designed to make whatever feat he was attempting
look easy: a wall was the right height to leap, a table proportioned to make a
dive over it appear effortless.”
The 41-year-old actor was in magnificent shape, wrote Margarita Landazuri in a winter 2013 article, courtesy of daily exercise in a gym on
the lot. But the kind of prop Ms. Boyes had in mind included trampolines placed
in large jars that Fairbanks’ title character would jump in and out of to elude
frustrated pursuers.
Contemporary audiences would also be enthralled by the
film’s exotic apparel, even for the 3,000 extras a day engaged for the production
(all requiring different clothes, according to costume designer Mitchell Leisen).
For a long time, estimates of the movie’s expenses
ranged from $2 million to $2.5 million. Perhaps these numbers were a Hollywood
publicist’s attempt to hype the movie’s production values.
But in 2008, Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance
disclosed that the budget was only half that previously supposed:
$1,135,654.65. What this meant was that the actor and his creative team had
used extra ingenuity to create what looked like a far more opulent spectacle.
The Thief of Bagdad
would be remade six more times in the past century, with a Technicolor 1940
version winning Oscars for Best Cinematography, Special Effects, and Art
Direction. But Fairbanks got it right the first time.
Quite simply, the original, according to critic Richard
Schickel’s December 1971 American Heritage article, “was full of
wonders that, if often imitated since (and in some cases technically improved),
have never been surpassed in their ability to delight.”
To get to this point, Fairbanks had been a shrewd
judge of his career, using his acrobatic skills and sunny optimism to bound
from Broadway to vaudeville to cinematic adventure hero to his current niche as
the embodiment of swashbuckling.
But with the coming of sound, the Great Depression, and his own aging, the actor could no longer nimbly negotiate these transitions.
When he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 56 in 1939, a
new generation of movie fans, upon hearing the name “Douglas Fairbanks,” was
more likely to associate it son Douglas Fairbanks Jr., then in the middle of
his own thriving career.
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