Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, J. Edward Bromberg
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age. This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.
The career of Linda Darnell can be broken up into two parts, largely before-and-after her work in Fallen Angel, which we profiled last week as the final starring role in the career of Alice Faye. We’ll also split our series about Darnell into two parts, with a pair of films from the first half of her career pre-Fallen Angel, and then two post Fallen Angel when her career as a proper leading woman (rather than just “the love interest”) took off, with her landing critically-lauded and more important pictures before her career derailed permanently in the early 1950’s. This week, we will profile her work with her most famous costar, Tyrone Power, in a massive hit for FOX that was seen at the time as a reaction to Warner Brothers success with The Adventures of Robin Hood.
(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the story of Don Diego Vega (Power), a wealthy young man who returns to California from Spain to find that his father is no longer in charge of Los Angeles, and instead he is being backed by a corrupt mayor (Bromberg), whose true muscle in office is the cruel Captain Esteban (Rathbone). Don Diego comes across as a dandy (and quite frankly, there’s a LOT of coded language implying that he’s pretending to be gay), but it’s all an act-he’s actually Zorro, the masked bandit who steals from the rich and gives back to the poor. Zorro comes across a beautiful woman Lolita (Darnell), who at first is disgusted by Don Diego even though she’s smitten with Zorro, and then eventually falls for them both, realizing they are one in the same. Don Diego fights Esteban to the death toward the end of the film, sending the corrupt mayor back to Spain & getting the girl while saving the city, a fitting & quick ending to a surprisingly brisk film.
The movie is a remake of a Douglas Fairbanks picture from 1920, and you can kind of see the lines from the Silent Era into the sound. The most thrilling aspects of the movie are all action that could have worked without dialogue, with my favorite being an incredible jump from a bridge where Zorro, mounted on a horse, jumps into a real river and somehow stays atop the animal (it’s hard to imagine anyone, much less Power, doing this stunt in the era before CGI). However, the movie’s actual scripted parts fall flat, even with Bromberg & character actress Gale Sondergaard as his horny-for-Power wife providing some comic relief. Even the Oscar-nominated score fails to impress, frequently feeling rather banal & while bouncy, not particularly memorable or in aid to the film itself.
Darnell’s major complaint about her earliest starring films was that she didn’t have anything to do except look beautiful…this feels like a pretty valid criticism of The Mark of Zorro. Darnell’s performance here is nothing above ordinary, with her looking beautiful but given little to do except be commented upon. There’s a scene where she’s talking with Zorro dressed as a monk (she doesn’t know it’s Zorro or Don Diego at this point), and she seems stunned that someone thinks she’s pretty since she’s only ever heard that from her maid, which feels vaguely absurd as she clearly has access to a mirror. Power is considerably better, dashing and funny and occasionally a bit more camp than you’d expect a film to be self-aware enough to achieve in 1940. This is the third of the four films I’m profiling of Darnell’s that I’ll be seeing this month, so I know she’s capable of more, and it’s a pity she’s mostly an ornament for Zorro to win here rather than adding much else to the picture.
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