Come On, You Cowards

The Black Pirate (1926)
directed by Albert Parker
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Fairbanks is able to sustain the same casualness, the same sense of heroic, effortless execution, clear through lovestruck salutes and mizzen-mast dismounts, then every cruelty and meanness his antagonist can muster. I mean Fairbanks the showman, who must have planned each one of these scenes, more than Fairbanks the lead. Smaller in scale and ambition than The Thief of Bagdad (that sea-level cave of buried treasure is too mysterious for a wedding boon), but no less contemplative, as even the lieutenant usurper stares thoughtfully out to sea from the windows of a captain's grand cabin: a pirate watching the moon. A squadron of soldiers alighting on a Spanish galleon from beneath the water gives a better sensation of flight - like birds - than breaststroke proficiency, and it's silly and beautiful all at once. The cruelty comes when the pirate king orders a ring cut from the guts of a prisoner who swallowed his betrothed's last keepsake. We see only the henchman's insouciant and bloody hand, staggering but sweetly part of the same grand and far-removed ordeal. There's no difference at all between two-strip Technicolor and the parents of Pickfair in a black-and-white Mexico, or any of it.