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188 Chapter 7 “The Mark of Greatness” The Adventures of Señor Zorro I am the friend of the oppressed, señor, and I have come to punish you. —Johnston McCulley, The Curse of Capistrano (1919) Among the varied progeny of the character of Zorro that have appeared since Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro was released in 1920, we may count the Caped Crusader himself, the Dark Knight: Batman. The creator of Batman, comic book artist and entrepreneur Bob Kane, acknowledged as much in an interview with us in 1989. “When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I saw The Mark of Zorro at the movies,” Kane remembered. Zorro was the most swashbuckling daredevil I’ve ever seen in my life. He gave me the idea of the dual identity . . . as a foppish bored Don Diego Vega, the son of one of the wealthiest families in Mexico around 1820 . . . and the crime fighter, Zorro. That had a profound influence on me. There had been other dual identities, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, but I got mine mainly from Zorro. So at night Zorro donned this mask, kind of a handkerchief mask with slits in the eyes; and he’d attach a trusty sword to his side and he’d exit from a cave on a black horse. I think the black horse’s name was Tornado. Many years afterward the cave became the bat cave and the horse the bat mobile.1 Now, of course, Kane’s Batman and Fairbanks’s Zorro, brothers in arms, if you will, are still busily avenging injustice, in comic books, graphic novels , television, and on screen. Difficult as it is to believe from today’s vantage point, not much was initially expected of The Mark of Zorro. As his fourth release from the newly The Adventures of Señor Zorro 189 formed United Artists, it was sandwiched between his more contemporary comedies, The Mollycoddle and The Nut. His initial disinterest in the story property was purportedly changed at the behest of Mary Pickford, who enthusiastically recommended it after reading it during their recent European vacation.2 Timid at first, Fairbanks’s began to realize that adding elements of historical romance to the rather ambivalent masculinity he had performed as early as The Lamb and as recently as The Mollycoddle —counterposing the duality of “effeminate” passivity with an aggressive masculinity—might be good box office. That Zorro turned out to be a box-office smash was an understatement. The premiere at the Capitol Theater in New York City on November 29, 1920, broke all records, and it proved to be his most successful film to date. For the rest of the decade, Fairbanks and United Artists were wedded inseparably to escapist costume adventures. And so we come back to Fairbanks’s first entry in his historical costume cycle of the 1920s, The Mark of Zorro. Zorro had made his first appearance a year earlier in the magazine All-Story Weekly on August 9. Johnston McCulley’s five-part story was called The Curse of Capistrano.” McCulley was fascinated by the setting of Old California during the days The Costume Films (drawing courtesy John C. Tibbetts). “The Imperial Reach” 190 of the mission empire. He began as a journalist with the Kansas City Star in 1913, traveled extensively throughout the country in later years, and finally settled into an apartment in New York, from which flowed his narratives of swordplay and romance. His novel Captain Fly-by-Night, which anticipated the events and setting of “The Curse of Capistrano,” dealt with political corruption in Old California, the landed power of the blooded caballeros, and the fading empire of the missions around Reina de Los Angeles. Likewise, in The Curse of Capistrano, “Señor Zorro” dashes in to right injustices wrought by the corrupt political system. Disguised by a black mask and a purple cloak, he “comes and goes like a graveyard ghost,” avenging wrongs all along El Camino Real. Eventually, he enlists the caballeros in his cause to overthrow the corrupt governor and his military power. Zorro is, in reality, one Don Diego Vega, son of one of the most powerful houses in Old California. Diego finds it necessary to disguise his activities by pretending to be a foppish, indifferent, trivial young man more interested in music and poetry than in justice—righting wrongs and dueling with the sword. The fame that came to Johnston McCulley, already a prolific writer of romances, also...

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