Last week’s look at some posters from the silent movie era inspired me to go ahead with this list of what I consider to be the top Douglas Fairbanks films prior to sound. (Talkies are just a fad, I’m tellin’ ya!)

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920) – Douglas Fairbanks digs into his comedic AND acrobatic skills in this first screen adaptation of Johnston McCully’s masked hero of 1820s California (The Curse of Capistrano had just been published the year before and Fairbanks bought the film rights for United Artists.)

In my opinion no actor has ever done a better job of drawing such a pronounced distinction between the foppish and timid Don Diego de Vega and his dashing alter ego, the swordsman Zorro. This movie showed all subsequent swashbuckler movies how it’s done and proved that its star could do more than just comedy.

Excellent fight choreography, heroic opposition…