The Private Life of Don Juan (1934)

Film: The Private Life of Don Juan (1934)

Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Merle Oberon, Gina Malo, Benita Hume

Director: Alexander Korda

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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.

Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. is a major star of his era that was not a timeless star.  As we talked about last week, Douglas Fairbanks wasn't really an actor that couldn't make it work in the Sound Era (there was nothing wrong with his voice, and as we'll talk about today, he still has a presence with sound movies that felt at-home with the screwball pictures that succeeded here), but he didn't pair well with the 1930's.  This was partially because he was older than actors like Gary Cooper & Clark Gable, both of whom were big names at the time who were a couple of decades the junior of Fairbanks, so there was very much a ticking clock on how long he could be the suave leading man.  And it was also in part because his movies went out of fashion.  For Depression Era audiences, they wanted escapism, but they wanted it with a modern flare, things like Dinner at Eight or Grand Hotel, movies that were how they wished they could live their lives, glamorously spending money vicariously through Joan Crawford or Jean Harlow.  They didn't want period dramas, which had been Fairbanks' bread-and-butter.  And so today we get to not just discuss our final film of the month, but also the last movie of Fairbanks' career as a leading man: the surprisingly witty & introspective The Private Life of Don Juan.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tackles Don Juan's (Fairbanks) life after he's already become a Lothario-like legend.  Here, he is so famous that men actually impersonate him, and get away with it because they are what Don Juan was 10 years ago-sexier, younger, more virile.  This causes a huge problem for the actual Don Juan, who at one point in the film shows his seduction techniques on Antonita (Oberon) a beautiful young dancer, but at the same time an imposter is seducing a woman across town with a jealous husband...who kills him.  She assumes this is the real Don Juan (because that's what she told him, and that's the fantasy both she & her husband enjoy), and there is a giant funeral for Don Juan, including women mourning him who have not even met him before (they just have fantasized about it).  The actual Don Juan takes this as an opportunity to move on from his life (and the problems his life has caused), but soon learns that the myth he has cultivated is essential to picking up women.  They now see him for what he is: a middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a paunch, and not the fantasy that they have come to expect from legends and fictional stories about him.  Even when he comes back, women don't recognize him, not even Antonita.  He eventually falls for the woman who has been pretending to be his widow, who is happy with the (aged) version of him as long as she gets him all to herself.

I'll be honest-I did not expect this movie to be as funny as it is, nor did I expect it to be as genuinely thought-provoking.  The script is a riot, and you see pretty quickly why Fairbanks' original fame as an actor was in comedy, not in action-adventure.  He is a gas as he fights with his manservant over eating too much, and there's a terrific bit where his doctor tries to trick him into admitting his age that feels almost like a Laurel & Hardy gag.  This is also surprising because it is downright impossible to find movies in Classical Hollywood where leading actors admit that they are getting older and less desirable.  Think of, say, Joan Crawford even in the 1960's attempting to play glamour girl roles in movies like Berserk!, or John Wayne inexplicably trying to get audiences to believe he can drive a young Angie Dickinson into fits of passion.  Yes, Fairbanks seduces Merle Oberon in this (an actress more beautiful than him, even when he was in his prime, and also 30 years younger than him), but the movie goes to great pains to make sure you know she's sleeping with Don Juan the Myth...not the man in front of her, even to the point of embarrassing him later in the movie when she can't recognize him.  Essentially, she was doing the modern equivalent of picturing your hot gym trainer while you were getting laid instead of the person actually on top of you (don't give me that look...we've all done it).

The film was good, and it's a sad final chapter for Fairbanks, particularly given that his career after this isn't all that interesting.  Fairbanks would divorce Mary Pickford in 1936, ending Hollywood's first storybook marriage, and though he was unique amongst stars of his era in that he was sober (something his ex-wife sadly could not boast), he was a habitual chain smoker, which caused severe heart problems for him.  He would work at he & Pickford's cofounded United Artists, but by the late 1930's he was unable to do most of the things that had once made him a star (i.e. giant action movies), so a comeback wasn't in the cards even if he wanted to have one.  In 1939, Fairbanks would die of a heart attack, at the age of only 56.  He was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where almost 70 years later his namesake son would be buried next to him.  Mary Pickford, who outlived her ex-husband by nearly 40 years, would eventually become a savvy businesswoman, and would be given accolades like two Academy Awards and a spot on the AFI's list of greatest stars (while Fairbanks would forever remain in her shadow, their marriage the most-known thing about his time as one of Tinseltown's biggest names).

Next month, we're going to talk about a star who would become the successor of Fairbanks in the Sound Era, taking on the swashbuckling roles in a way no other actor would in Classical Hollywood (to the point where the word "swashbuckling" basically conjures up images of him).  He would also have perhaps the most controversial off-screen life of any actor of Hollywood's Golden Age, in many ways dwarfing his onscreen persona, which we will inevitably also discuss.