When movie audiences first met Zorro, in Douglas Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro (1920), he was grinning sinisterly, dragging on a little cigar and taking aim with his six-gun. Filmed only a year after the character was introduced in a Johnston McCulley short story, Zorro was cowboy in disguisea masked man in black wearing a long do-rag under his distinctive Spanish brimmed hat. The kinkier accessories, including high shiny leather boots and gloves, would be introduced in later iterations.
The original Mark of Zorro is included in the bonus disc of “Zorro: The Complete Series.” The 15-DVD set is not dedicated to the 1950s Disney production familiar to Baby Boomers but a 1990-93 Family Channel series. The early ‘90s Zorro was a lightweight contender among masked heroes, but the bonus disc is fascinating and well worth a close look by students of cinema history and pop culture.
The title card opening Zorro’s 1920 silent movie debut states the story’s message: “Oppression by its very nature creates the power that crushes it.” Zorro represented the romantic, Byronic figure of the aristocratic freedom fighter sallying forth from his comfortable estate to battle injustice. Only Lord Byron didn’t travel incognito to wage war against the Turks. Zorro was the alter ego of mild-mannered Don Diego, a handsome young landowner in Spanish California, and if the set-up sounds a little like superheroes to come, the comic creators thought so, too. In the DC universe, The Mark of Zorro was the film young Bruce Wayne was watching in the cinema the night his parents were murdered. Presumably, it was the 1940 version with Tyrone Power under the mask.
Although Zorro was always incredibly agile, his scope wasn’t as wide as the superheroes. He couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, but could climb walls and glide along tiled rooftops with the greatest of ease. He was a little like a low-tech Bat Man. In the 1920 film, Zorro emerged on his black steed from a stable concealed beneath his hacienda. Could it have been a model for the Bat Cave?
The masked rider of the original Mark of Zorro came and went “like a graveyard ghost” on his mission of “punishing and protecting.” The whole thing has an odd resonance of the Ku Klux Klan as depicted in D.W. Griffith’s controversial, innovative film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The Klansmen of Griffith’s film (and old-time Southern lore) were portrayed as masked crusaders punishing the wrongdoers who descended upon the fallen Confederacy, protecting Southern whites from Union occupiers and newly enfranchised blacks. They rode the night wind like graveyard ghosts. Was Zorro the forgotten link between Griffith and DC Comics? Perhaps the author who first imagined the character had seen The Birth of a Nation, but he clearly had ideas of his own. In The Mark of Zorro the masked man was the protector of Native Americans against their colonial abusers and everyone else against the greedy tyranny of corrupt officials. “Justice for all!” he shouted with the help of a title card and who can argue with that?
