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.

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.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Film: The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Snitz Edwards, Charles Belcher, Julianne Johnston, Anna May Wong

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: Predates the Academy Awards

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.

We are back-sorry I missed last week.  Between throwing my back out (getting old sucks, y'all), and not really having any gumption last weekend, and the truly depressing monstrosities that the Trump administration is unleashing on my fellow Twin Cities residents, I was not in a writing mood last weekend (and while my back is getting better, Trump is worse than ever), and missed this.  My hope is still to get back into the swing of things and make up the missing film of Douglas Fairbanks in the next two weeks.  In the meantime, though, we are at least in a similar spot to where we were two weeks ago when we talked through The Mark of Zorro.  In 1924, Fairbanks was continuing to establish himself as the first true action star after a decade in comedy.  His marriage to Mary Pickford, which had started with a quite tawdry affair (Fairbanks was very much still married at the time to his first wife Anna Beth Sully), was now a storybook marriage for the country to gush over, the first true Hollywood super-couple emerging.  And with today's film, we get to the movie that is probably the most critically-remembered of Fairbanks' pictures, a gargantuan movie that is one of the most revered of the 1920's, and was during a small period where Fairbanks star could rival his wife's...though she was always #1 to his #2, something that would become increasingly a problem in the years ahead.

(Spoilers Ahead) Today's film is The Thief of Bagdad, the 1924 version (not to be confused with the Oscar-winning 1940 version starring Conrad Veidt of Casablanca fame).  It features Fairbanks as Ahmed, the thief of Bagdad, who is a rapscallion who has dreams of using a magic rope that he has stolen to pursue even greater fortune when he falls in love with a young princess (Johnston).  She is about to be wed, and he pursues her in disguise as a prince, but when she chooses to marry him, he reveals he is nothing but a commoner.  He is said to be tortured for his treachery, but he escapes, and intends to win the second contest for the princess's (who is now in love with him) hand, to bring back the greatest treasure.  This sets off a long battle with a Mongolian prince, but one that Ahmed will surely win when he gets both a magical carpet and a magical powder that can conjure anything he wishes.  The film ends with him having defeated the evil prince, and getting to marry the princess.

The Thief of Bagdad is renowned today for its incredible production design and groundbreaking trick photography, making items appear "as if from nowhere" and both of these things are, indeed, impressive.  The sets, without the advantage of CGI, recreate through both gigantic scale and in some cases convincing miniatures an Arabia worthy of 1001 nights, and if you just look at this movie for its visual splendor, you get why it's so well-loved.  It looks beautiful, and for audiences of the 1920's, even compared to some of the grand-scale epics that DW Griffith had wrought by then, this is really in a class by itself.

The story itself, though, is way too long, and insanely repetitive.  Fairbanks is fun (I don't know why I had this impression of him as being super stodgy onscreen, as just like Zorro he's very charismatic & sexy in this part as well), and a young Anna May Wong steals every scene she's in as a duplicitous maid, but the rest of the cast is a snore, and the action set-pieces lose some of their sparkle when you have to follow so much plot with surprisingly few title cards to keep you along the way.  The movie's inspiration on future film design (you can literally see how Disney borrowed from this with Aladdin in the castle design), has to count for something, but I'll own that I was bored and wished it had about 30 minutes less of its nearly 150-minute runtime...more adventure, less random asides with the princess and evil prince (that go nowhere).

The Mark of Zorro (1920)

Film: The Mark of Zorro (1920)

Stars: Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marguerite de la Motte, Noah Beery, Robert McKim

Director: Fred Niblo

Oscar History: Predated the Oscars

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.

It feels weird to start an assessment of Douglas Fairbanks with a movie he made when he was 37, particularly as we kick off a year focusing on movies starring action heroes (i.e. people in their physical prime).  But that's kind of appropriate for Fairbanks.  While he had had some success in the 1900's in Broadway shows, and had made movies (including The Lamb in 1915 which arguably was the first film to focus on Fairbanks' athletic prowess), The Mark of Zorro is really the picture that cemented Fairbanks as a proper leading man, and one of the biggest names in cinema in the 1920's.  It's also the first movie to really focus on him as an action star, rather than using him for comic effect, which of course leans into our theme, but also creates a fascinating juxtaposition that won't honestly be the case for any of the 11 actors we profile the remainder of the year: Douglas Fairbanks doesn't look like an action star.

(Spoilers Ahead) This was the first Zorro film, and it plays pretty close to the legend that you'd be familiar with if you are more used to Tyrone Power or Antonio Banderas playing this part.  We have the wimpy Don Diego Vega (Fairbanks), the foppish heir to a large ranch fortune, who is set to marry Lolita Pulido (de la Motte), a beautiful but unimpressed daughter of a nearby ranch who is struggling for money (and needs her to marry rich).  She, though, is madly in love with the dashing Zorro (also Fairbanks) who is trying to overthrow the colonial government and fights for her hand (and her kiss) with great honor.  The film has regular tangles that ensue, including the villain also trying to win over Lolita, before we get to the grand reveal, where Don Diego, out of mask, proves that he is willing to fight bravely for Lolita's honor, and unmasks himself in the shockingly graphic (there is a bloody Z carved on one of the villains' foreheads) finale, complete with her in love with both Don Diego AND Zorro, ready to save the day.

For fear of overwhelming you with punctuation, I will largely refer to our January Star as "Douglas Fairbanks" going forward rather than repeatedly using his post-nominal letters, but I do want to point out that, for those familiar with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., you'll notice that there's a stark difference between the two men aesthetically.  Junior, by pretty much any definition (including modern standards-of-beauty) is gorgeous in his prime.  With his pencil thin mustache, thick hair, giant ears, and piercing eyes, he looks like a really handsome cross between Clark Gable and William Powell.  His father, as a rule, was not hot by our modern standards.  37 in 1920 meant something a lot different than 37 today, and going into this movie, where Fairbanks was expected to play a sex symbol, I figured this would feel a bit comical.

So imagine my surprise that Fairbanks looks crazy great as Zorro.  He cuts a surprisingly athletic figure in the title role, and his action scenes are impressive.  This was in many ways the first major action-adventure movie, and it has all of the tropes of the genre (charming leading man, daring stunts, and a love story), and while it is stuck a little bit by being the prototype (i.e. other films had room to improve), it is aided by Fairbanks being a pleasantly good actor.  His Don Diego is unlikable, but his Zorro is palpitating-I'm curious if this continues, but this adds a level that the Power & Banderas films don't (i.e. those films it's hard to understand why the beautiful girl doesn't immediately fall for them alongside of Zorro...here there's an explanation).  Color me somewhat excited to get into the filmography of a man I have seen very little of this month after catching his star-making turn.

Saturdays with the Stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  In our last season, focused on America's Sweethearts, we started with Mary Pickford, who was the first film star to bear that title, and would become one half of Hollywood's first celebrity supercouple, a trend that continues even today with people like Ryan Reynolds & Blake Lively or Beyonce & Jay-Z.  It seems fitting, then, that our seventh season, in some ways the masculine ying to last season's feminine yang, starts with the man she shared the distinction of being part of Hollywood's first supercouple with, the man who would dominate the 1920's as one of the decade's biggest names.  This month's star is Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of a broken home as his father quickly left when Douglas and his brother were just children.  He took on the name Fairbanks after his mother remarried, but kept it in part to hide the Jewish identity that he never publicly acknowledged from his father.  He began acting as a teenager, appearing in local theater and summer stock productions before moving to New York, where he became a regular player on Broadway and married his first wife Anna Beth Sully, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and had his only child (future movie star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.).  The Fairbanks family would end up in Los Angeles in 1915, and quickly after Fairbanks would make a name for himself playing athletic roles under contract to Paramount, where he would become the biggest star in Hollywood (give or take his new wife Mary).

Most of our stars this year I am very familiar with their careers, in some cases having seen literally dozens of their movies.  So it seems like a fun start to go with an actor I've only seen in two movies (Intolerance and The Taming of the Shrew).  Fairbanks would become not just a big star, but in many ways the template for future action stars-taking on big, iconic roles like Zorro and Robin Hood that we still see in movies today.  He would also have a relatively scandalous personal life, one that was covered by the veneer of respectability his "America's Sweetheart" wife would bring with him, which we will also talk about as we look at our first action hero leading man.

The Taming of the Shrew (1929)

Film: The Taming of the Shrew (1929)

Stars: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Edwin Maxwell, Joseph Cawthorn, Clyde Cook

Director: Sam Taylor

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Shirley Temple: click here to learn more about Ms. Pickford (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Mary Pickford had it all circa 1927.  She was the biggest actress in Hollywood, had a storybook marriage, and thanks to her founding of United Artists, she was an early star who was actually getting the fruits of her labor, even producing some of her successful films like Sparrows we saw last week, making her a very rich woman.  But sound became her undoing.  Like many of the major stars of the era (including Greta Garbo) the studio waited to see if sound was sticking around as a trend before having Pickford in a sound film, not wanting to risk one of their bigger stars on a fad.  When it did prove permanent, contrary to legend, Pickford's first sound film was a success with both audiences & critics.  We oftentimes use a modern lens when we appraise older movies, and Coquette is (by my estimation) one of the worst movies to ever win Best Actress, both in terms of a performance & in terms of the film's overall quality, but at the time critics liked it & audiences did too.  People have accused her of "buying" the Oscar given her stature in Hollywood (she was a founding member of the Academy) and she did campaign, even inviting people to her palatial estate of Pickfair to see it, but honestly given that the Oscars have long been eager to crown the reigning queen of Hollywood (everyone from Audrey Hepburn to Julia Roberts to Emma Stone), she likely would've won anyway.  It wasn't until her next film, our film today The Taming of the Shrew, that Pickford started to see her career unravel in the Sound Era.

(Spoilers Ahead) Despite coming in at about 60 minutes, The Taming of the Shrew is a relatively faithful adaptation of at least some scenes in the Shakespearean play.  We have Petruchio (Fairbanks) challenged to tame the wild, willful Katherina (Pickford), in part so that Katherina's younger sister Bianca can marry.  Katherina & Petruchio marry, largely against her best judgment, and in the process he begins to (to use modern parlance) "gaslight" her into thinking that he's trying to do what's best for her, in the process thinking he's tamed her, and made her obedient.  In reality, she's in on the ruse, having heard him confess his plans to his dog (yeah, that's an actual scene in the movie), and winks at both the other women and the audience when she gives her speech about women needing to "obey" their husbands.

The movie ignores most of the side characters, including Bianca, keeping them only for tertiary parts, and stays focused on the superstar couple at the center.  This makes sense.  Everyone in American in 1929 would've known who Mary Pickford & Douglas Fairbanks were, as they were the first Hollywood marriage to become a tabloid staple, and this is the only film the two ever made together.  It's interesting to look at Taming of the Shrew against some of the other pictures of the era, partially because it's so grand & its look really stand out.  When comedies & gangster pictures were starting to come en vogue, this feels like a tribute to the biblical epics of Cecil B. DeMille or the gargantuan stories of DW Griffith that had started to fade.

Being out of style feels retro today, but at the time probably just read as tired, as the film was a flop.  It wasn't helped by Pickford & Fairbanks being badly miscast in the movie.  Pickford, after seeing her in multiple films this month, strikes me as a good actress, but a limited one who didn't do well getting out of her lane.  That was true here-she's never believable as Katherina, the headstrong woman, given she plays every scene like a pixie.  The only convincing scene she does is the final one, where she's supposed to be in on a joke with the audience, and the sly wink works.  Fairbanks, though, is truly bad here.  He's never believably of his time (while the side characters all feel more authentic to a Shakespearean stage play, he reads as a loudmouthed movie star), and spends half the film laughing boisterously, which initially comes across as a character trait, but, eventually reads as someone trying to remember his next line.  There's lots of future evidence that people who were lovers in real life simply couldn't translate that chemistry in the film itself...this is proof that's happened since Hollywood's beginning.