Rouben Mamoulian | The Mark of Zorro / 1940

the shimmer of silk and satin

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Taintor Foote (screenplay, based on the original story by Johnston McCulley as rewritten by Garrett Fort and Bess Meredyth), Rouben Mamoulian (director) The Mark of Zorro / 1940

 

     Rouben Mamoulian may certainly be a better director than Niblo and he is a far superior technician, able to use light and shadow in a manner that sometimes matches the best of noir. But he is a stubborn conventionalist, and almost every film he made stomps clumsily upon the subtle and buried elements of narrative that helped to make the stories and previous films so remarkable. What he earlier did for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) he also does for The Mark of Zorro, normalizing as many sexual subtleties and outright questions as possible and streamlining narrative that makes what was confusing and fun into a plodding tale. Several critics have argued that he made his 1940 version of the Zorro film with tongue firmly planted in his cheek, but I suggest if that’s true, he certainly clenched his teeth around the subject at hand so that the tongue never quite reached the flesh on the other side.

   The film begins interestingly in Spain, which might have further established the difference of cultures; yet his Spain seems more like a US military training camp with handsome cadets dressed up in 19th century regalia than a portrayal of the world of fashion and style as it is later characterized by both the male and female Americans when he returns. Nonetheless, it does establish his “difference” immediately, as he is unwillingly called home by his father.

      Niblo’s Zorro had already returned and discovered the corrupt changes that had taken place while he was gone presumably over a period of time. But Mamoulian’s Don Diego (Tyrone Power) discerns those changes through the reactions the peons he meets at a bar and later when he attempts to hire a cab to pick up his luggage in the port of Los Angeles (the man he hires serving as a remnant of the character Bernardo in the original, a man whose tongue has been removed by the current government). Proudly describing himself as the son of the Alcalde (Mayor) of Los Angeles,,all men immediately grow silent and leave the room, or in the case of the oarsman who rows his boat from the ship to shore, curses the man he believes to be his father.

        His father, he soon learns, has been forced to resign by the current mayor Dom Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg) and the man behind his rise to power, Captain Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone), who appears regularly with a sword in his hand, cuts away at anything the appears to need downsizing, candles and men equally. The problem of showing us this discovery of this information first hand, makes it very difficult to imagine that Don Diego is able to assimilate the new reality as suddenly as he does in the film, as well accounting for his immediate transformation of himself into the enemy of the state, Zorro, particularly since his father is a man who is so devoted to law that will not even fight against injustice.  In short, we have no sense of logical development in Don Diego’s crucial metamorphosis: how does he learn of all the evils Don Luis and Esteban have wrought and how has he come to so quickly to decide on the alternative persona of Zorro (the Fox)? Niblo’s narrative allows us to imagine a gradual recognition of the facts and perhaps a seasoned transformation, while in Mamoulian’s rendition it is sudden and full-blown.

      Here too, however, Don Diego presents himself as queer male, replete with handkerchief and the finery of Madrid dress. But gone is the snuff box and the character’s more effeminate gestures (made even more remarkable in the earlier version by the constant athleticism of Fairbanks). Yet in one rather long and witty statement, Don Diego makes clear his homosexual possibilities. Asked to join her in shopping by Don Luis’ aspiring bourgeois wife, Inez (Gale Sondergaard), who immediately is delighted by the young man because of his Madrid manners and dress, Don Diego answers:

 

            Oh, you tempt me Señora. I…I love the shimmer of silk and satin, the

            matching one delicate shade against the other. Then there’s the choosing

            of scents and lotions…attar of rose, carnation, crushed lily, and musk. As

            for the ornaments and jewels—

 

     His pean to shopping is interrupted by Don Luis who reminds Inez that Don Diego is on his way to see his father after many years abroad.

      But the very fact that Diego has already taken on this queer personality without even knowing the full circumstances of how his father was forced to leave the office and how cruelly Don Luis and particularly Esteban and his Sergeant Gonzales (George Regas) have treated the peasants, hints of his acculturation of gay mannerisms. The director accordingly encourages us somewhat to speculate on just how much of this mad pleasure in shopping might be real or how much it is feigned. It appears almost impossible that he might have already cooked up his plot to fool the new Alcalde and his men.

 

     Lest you might actually fear, however, that Don Diego is truly gay, Mamoulian quickly has Diego catch the sight of the beautiful Lolita (Linda Darnell), in this version Don Luis’ and Inez’ niece inexplicably living with them. Don Diego may be foppish in the 1940’s Zorro tale but he is most definitely, so the director seems to insist, not a homosexual. Gone is his loyal accomplice Bernardo and even Zorro’s basement* home lair, with all its secret rooms and passageways. Inexplicably and absolutely unnecessarily, the Vega family home has been taken over as the headquarters of the new Mayor, wiping away, moreover, the possibility of a subterranean “other” world that coexisted with the “real” world against which Zorro fights. Only a more banal series of “magic” tricks remains as evidence of the fantastical private world in which Don Diego exists. In sum, all of the closeted aspects of Don Diego’s life are wiped clean by Mamoulian and his writers, presumably so that one perceives the persona of Don Diego as only a thin disguise.

      And where in Niblo’s version Don Diego hides his other self from the world, allowing only the mute Bernardo to know the “truth,” Mamoulian’s Diego can hardly wait to tell the world who he truly is, first making it clear to his beloved Lolita that the effeminate Diego and Zorro are one and the same; and then explaining the truth to Friar Felipe (the wonderful Eugene Pallette, who carries with him his Friar Tuck role from Robin Hood with all of its associations), Diego’s more radicalized “father.”   

      In this version, having to dress on the go, Diego at one point drops part of Zorro’s costume—an act that any gay observer might readily describe as “dropping beads”—and is forced to clumsily leap in and out of bushes in search his version of Superman’s phone booth. The only time he actually uses one of his former home’s subterranean passageways, he stupidly leaves his footprints in the mud leading to Don Luis’ office, and his eventual discovery. His final “unmasking,” if you can describe it as that, comes from Esteban’s taunt of calling him a “popinjay,” an extravagant being perhaps, but hardly a true expression of his enemy’s disdain for his manhood. As Diego, he challenges Esteban to a swordfight which, of course, he wins by killing the villain and establishing his “true” identity, as well as getting himself arrested.

 

     In sum, Mamoulian makes certain that we never for one moment truly question whether Diego and Zorro are one in the same man. Mirrors are banned from this production for fear that the real vampire of homosexuality might possibly be revealed. Diego’s foppishness is simply that, an affectation he takes on to pretend to hide behind. Most of his energies are not spent in actually running about the neighborhood saving men about to be beaten or killed but on simply convincing Luis Quintero to resign, hurrying off with his wife to Madrid, and re-appointing his father Don Alejandro Vega (Montagu Love), who has a very small role in this movie, as Algalde.

     One almost wonders, indeed, whether the homosexual hints have been banished from this film in order to cover for star Tyrone Power’s real-life bisexuality. A better director than Mamoulian might have encouraged those very sexual variances in creating the perfect Zorro. Yet we must always remember that working under yoke of the Film Production Code created a world in which even the slightest of deviances might have closed down the film. In 1940 Zorro could no longer openly be both pansy and athletic male hero.

     Since the very heart of the story relies on the dual realities of Diego and Zorro, this 1940 version of Mark of Zorro has little to offer its audiences. I doubt you could even make a proper TV series from this rendition of Zorro, in which nearly everyone who matters but his highly principled father and the stupid villains are fooled—and even they not completely. Even Don Diego’s mother (Janet Beecher) suspects there is something that her son is telling her, and that it isn’t the fact that “he’s gay.”

     In the story of Batman as told in the DC Comics, Bruce Wayne attended a movie version of Zorro as a child and left the movie theater moments before his parents were killed in front of his eyes by an armed thug. Zorro, accordingly, became Bruce’s childhood hero who utterly influenced his later Batman persona. Critics have long argued about which version Bruce saw. The Dark Knight Returns argues it was Mamoulian’s 1940 version. But Alan Grant, writer of the later Batman comic books, insists it was the 1920 original, with similarities in costume and the “Bat Cave,” so much like Douglas Fairbanks’ cave, along with the sustained confusion of identities. Cartoonist Bill Finger relates that it was Fairbank’s Zorro that inspired the figure he created.

     I now perceive it utterly impossible that Batman’s original viewing was of Mamoulian’s heterosexually homogenized version. Robin, the Boy Wonder is simply a far gayer version of the original Bernardo. And there no evidence that Tyrone Power could even stay in costume long enough to trick the clever lovers and villains Riddler, Cat-Woman, Penguin or any of the other figures that populate his world.

      Interestingly, in Todd Phillips’ 2019 psychological film Joker, with its references to both the works of director Martin Scorsese and to Batman, on the theater marquee in front of which Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed, the film title reads Zorro: The Gay Blade, connecting it to the 1981 return the Zorro’s myths’ homosexual links.

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).