The Iron Mask (1929)

Film: The Iron Mask (1929)

Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Belle Bennett, Marguerite de la Motte, Dorothy Revier, Vera Lewis

Director: Allan Dwan

Oscar History: Most of the categories that would've been an option (Costume, Makeup, Visual Effects) were decades away, though one wonders why it wasn't an option for Art Direction given the rather impressive sets.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.: click here to learn more about Mr. Fairbanks (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

A lot of the conversations about Douglas Fairbanks to modern audiences focus on one of two things.  First, there is his "storybook" marriage to Mary Pickford, one that started with a scandalous affair (while Fairbanks was still married) and would end with a shocking divorce (at least to the public) that we'll get into next week during our final Fairbanks movie.  But the second we'll talk about today, and that is Fairbanks' uncomfortable position as one of the quintessential actors whose career was destroyed by the coming Sound Era.  There are other actors (including Pickford) who didn't have as much success in the Sound Era, but they aren't shown as an example of the stars who couldn't make it at all in the new era of Sound.  And while actors like John Gilbert & Norma Talmadge certainly saw their careers disappear with the Sound Era due to their voices, it's Fairbanks that has lasted the longest in the public's memory as not being "suitable" for the Sound Era, perhaps in recent years due to The Artist, the 2011 Best Picture winner that is based in part on Fairbanks' life, enough so that star Jean Dujardin referenced Fairbanks in his Golden Globes speech that year.

(Spoilers Ahead) So in many ways The Iron Mask, a sequel to a previous film of Fairbanks (1921's The Three Musketeers), is a swan song for our January star.  The film is much in-line with what we've come to expect from the actor.  Despite being in his mid-forties at the time, The Iron Mask has a number of impressive stunts and fighting sequences, and is honestly a really lavish and gorgeous production (I'm not doing my typical plot recap because this story has been told countless times on big-screens and in TV parodies like The Simpsons, and it doesn't break a lot of new ground, though it is notable as the only major film of Fairbanks' Silent Era career where he dies in the end).  I referenced above that this movie didn't get an Art Direction nomination, but one thinks it should have-it looks really good, and very rarely appears to be a sound stage in the way that a lot of films of this era (even some which Fairbanks did).

But this is where I will own that I did not see the film that Academy voters in 1929 would've seen, so I want to caveat that a bit (and why I'm giving this 3/5 stars here instead of rounding down like I normally would given I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd).  The first fully sound film featuring Fairbanks was The Taming of the Shrew, a movie we profiled when we talked about Mary Pickford in Season 6, which is bad (and Fairbanks is bad in it), but this is not the first sound film he did-The Iron Mask included an opening narration from Fairbanks at the time of release.  What it did not include, but was added in the 1950's, was a narration of the plot by his son Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., which was used in replacement of title cards, likely to help it for television audiences (at the time, it was quite common to have movies running at off-times during the day, or eventually late in the evening).  It is possible to see both versions of the movie...but the one I saw on Amazon was the one reedited with Fairbanks Jr.  This gives off the effect of a Disney nature film (where you are being spoon-fed the plot even if you're seeing it with your own eyes), and takes away a lot of the beautiful work that the late-Silent Era acting is doing here.

Fairbanks is fun in The Iron Mask, and over 85 years after the fact, I don't get the same sense of how passé this was likely becoming after a decade of box office dominance with similarly-themed movies.  But this is considered by many to be his last big hurrah, and it's worth noting that it wasn't Fairbanks' voice that really cost him in the new era.  Fairbanks voice wasn't bad (this isn't like, say, Clara Bow or Emil Jannings where their strong accents made them impossible to see in the same types of moves in the United States), and probably would've worked...but like many action stars we'll profile this year, he was physically at an age where he couldn't continue to outdo his stunts, and this type of movie (which wouldn't be particularly popular in the early 1930's from even younger stars like Tyrone Power or John Wayne) wouldn't be in fashion again until the 1940's, by which time Fairbanks would be dead (again, which we'll get to next week).  Therefore, the idea of Fairbanks as a victim of the Silent Era isn't really a fair assessment-it wasn't his voice, but his age (and changing tastes), that was more the culprit in why he couldn't stay a movie star in the 1930's while others of his era (like Greta Garbo & Joan Crawford) would become even bigger names with the introduction of Sound (and in part, would become lasting legends in a way that Fairbanks never could).  We'll talk about the final chapter of Fairbanks life, and what he did when movies dried up, next week.