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299 Chapter 15 Prologue There is a certain literary archetype, suggests the Australian historian Peter Conrad, author of Creation: Artists, Gods, Origins (207), that is found in the characters of Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and Don Juan. It is a compound of bruised ideals, restless wanderlust, and romantic failure . Collectively, these characters “want to go everywhere and become everyone,” to migrate “through time, place and metamorphic changes of identity to declare their ambitions to experience an infinitude of possibilities .” Eventually, Conrad continues, as they enter the global sphere, “they alter and contradict themselves at will: the mythic creature survives in history by mutating; eternity puts on camouflage for its descent into time.”1 Nothing better describes the characters and trajectories of the four films, released from 1930 to 1934, that bring Douglas Fairbanks’s active career to a close. Reaching for the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Minutes , Mr. Robinson Crusoe, and The Private Life of Don Juan reveal those “ambitions to experience an infinitude of possibilities.” The collection of artists and husbands seen here constitute a composite of the increasingly restless private and professional Fairbanks. Crusoe-like, he forsook Hollywood for far-flung ports of call. Like Quixote, he tilted at the “windmills” of elusive ideals. And like the aging Don Juan, he sought fleshly pleasures wherever he found them. Many critics and biographers have not been kind to these films. They point out their occasionally silly and outdated humor and their embarrassing depictions of a wealthy, middle-aged American abroad. The fine line between Fairbanks as a buoyantly optimistic young American and Fairbanks as an aging, tiresome showoff has been breached. While acknowledging the justness of this assessment, however, we hold a more moderate Artists and Husbands 300 view. Curiosities these films undeniably are, and they are also occasionally awkward and embarrassing. They graphically reveal the cruel fate awaiting celebrities in the face of advancing age and the fickleness of audiences. That, in part, is what gives them their interest—even their relevance—to today’s hyper-celebrity culture. Fairbanks, as always, made his life an open book. And he may even have come to dislike the kinds of pictures he was now making, but he made them nonetheless. We maintain, after fresh viewings, that Fairbanks gave them some of his finest moments, both as a filmmaker and an actor. If justification is needed for their inclusion here, that is it. The Private Life of Don Juan, in particular, is a beautiful and moving valedictory to his career. While thematically linked to the other three, we hope to demonstrate that it deserves to stand on its own as one of Fairbanks’s finest films. The years 1930–1934 saw our vagabond on the road, embarked on an ambitious travel schedule that, excepting sporadic returns to Pickfair, left Hollywood and wife Mary Pickford behind. In the opinion of the press, he was “abdicating” his Hollywood throne. While rumors would eventually fly about a “divorce” in the offing with Mary, Douglas was reported as saying , “Why don’t I stay in Hollywood? Well, it probably wouldn’t look well in print, but it bores me. That is the truth. Why should I spend my life in a narrow little village when there’s a whole world to amuse myself in?”2 While Fairbanks had long expressed the desire to combine travel with moviemaking—as early as 1916–1917 he was planning to make films in Europe and South America—this new itinerary was different. It was touched with a restlessness bordering on desperation. He set sail for biggame hunting in Indochina, Siam, and India. He was in England by May for a reunion with Mary. This was the trip that would provide most of the footage for Around the World in Eighty Minutes. In November 1931, he left for Europe, Africa, and Asia to make another travel picture, but changed his mind while in Paris and returned to Pickfair by Christmas. By January of 1932, he was abroad again, this time in the South Sea Islands, where much of Mr. Robinson Crusoe was shot. He returned in May of that year, but turned right around and left in August on the SS Chichibu Maru to hunt longhaired tigers in Manchuria. The party was forbidden entry to Tibet to hunt the giant panda but managed to safari through Indochina. Plans for a screenplay about China never materialized. He returned to Pickfair by Christmas 1932. By February, with rumors of a...

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