Douglas Messerli | Edna Foster, Boy Former [Introduction]

edna foster, boy performer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edna Foster played both young women and the male character Billy in several of the Biograph movies directed by D. W. Griffith. She evidently maintained the “Billy” nickname and some senses of the character off the screen as well, film historian Susan Stryker suggesting she was identified in fan magazines for her muscular development and her short-trimmed hair, and was known for wearing male attire in public. Whether or not the actor perceived herself as transsexual or transgender is not known.

    It was clear that Griffith was attracted to her for her ability to visually convey the emotions of a young boy, which she does particularly well in The Adventures of Billy and several of her other films. Here I discuss her films, two from 1911 The Adventures of Billy and A Country Cupid, and two she made in 1912, A Terrible Discovery, The Baby and the Stork, and Billy's Stratagem.

Douglas Messerli | Hidden Pictures [Introduction]

hidden pictures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Over the years, one of the most popular of LGBTQ fictions was perhaps the hardest one to actually pin down as representing the gay experience. There is no question that Oscar Wilde’s renowned fiction about a handsome, apparently bisexual man, whose beauty attracts both sexes represents the kind of closeted condition of the homosexual in disapproving societies. But to actually pin Dorian Gray to gay sexual activity is difficult unless you more fully examine his relationships with the painter Basil Hallward, the influences upon his character of Lord Henry Wotton, and, in particular, his former relationship with Alan Campbell over whom Dorian evidently holds some sort of power of blackmail, presumably their own sexual relationship including a letter. But all of these subtleties were surely difficult to express in the short silent versions which were highly popular in the second decade of the 20th century.

       The subject was filmed in Denmark, the US, Russia, Germany, and Hungary, but all of these versions are lost and we have only sparse listings and commentary on them. In a sense they have all become “hidden” versions the The Picture just as surely as Dorian’s own locked-away portrait

Douglas Messerli | Rebels Without a Good Cause [Introduction]

rebels without a good cause

by Douglas Messerli

 

From 1909 to 1911, Kalem pictures featured a series of six short films, all directed by Sidney Olcott, written and starring Gene Gauntier about a girl spy, Nan, working for the Confederate cause during the Civil War.

     The films include The Girl Spy: An Incident of the Civil War (1909), The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy (1910), The Bravest Girl in the South (1910), The Love Romance of the Girl Spy (1910), The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1910), and To the Aid of Stonewall Jackson: An Exploit of the Girl Spy (1911).

      These shorts all feature Gauntier as a rough and tumble hero, willing to go through the most difficult of feats, and who at one point or another cross-dresses in order to achieve her goals. They were inspired by the real-life woman spy Belle Boyd. They were shot at Kalem studios near Jacksonville, Florida.

      The adventures are important, in part, because they were the precursors to the popular serial films in the 1910s starring Pearl White and Grace Cunard, which featured women able to take on their male counterparts; but also, in terms of LGBTQ+ history because they represented the first wave of US films featuring strong and daring women as cross-dressers, which included also The House of Closed Shutters (1910), The Red Girl and the Child (1910), Taming a Husband (1910), and Judith of  Bethulia (1914), among others.

       Only three of these films remain available, the first held at the at the Library and Archives Canada, the second at The British Film Institute and The Library of Congress, and The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

Douglas Messerli | Masked Men [essay]

masked men

by Douglas Messerli

                       “Can you trust me, a man who wears a mask?”

                                                      —Diego Vega, Zorro: The Gay Blade                                             

 

All masked men—and women—are automatically suspect of being LGBTQ. The very fact that an individual chooses to replace one identity with a hidden other can only remind us for of the recent past when gay men and lesbians needed to hide their identities, a necessity even today in many countries and a phenomenon which may possibly be repeating itself in the US as hatred for LGBTQ+ people grows in conversative communities and states where even school librarians are being accused of grooming their students for sex through LGBTQ novels and other books. 

 

     That does not mean that all male and female superheroes who are masked are necessarily gay or lesbian or even hiding any aspect of their sexuality; it simply calls that individual into question. And from the earliest of the Zorro films, The Mark of Zorro (1920) directed by the character Fred Niblo, the film’s central character, in his alternation between what is basically an effete and effeminate male totally disinterested in women and his darker half—in what is rather an inversion of the standard metaphor—a mysterious and dangerous lover and Robin Hood-like champion of the people did everything to encourage the gay speculations.

     By 1940, however, given the Film Production Codes’s strict limitations on pansy portrayals and the timidity of director Rouben Mamoulian, Zorro’s mask hid only his face while dismissing the idea that it need cover up any of his personal aberrations and sexual identities. And, accordingly, the clumsy and quite meandering Tyrone Power—whose rumored bisexuality—might have promised a portrayal of a near perfect Zorro, whose mask allowed him to perform on both sides of society, did little to excite us as the first version had. As I note in the essay below, this Zorro could hardly wait to reveal his identity. And, although there are some minor indications that he might have a deeper sensibility than the virile ladies’ man he outwardly portrays, they are never fully explored. This Zorro’s mask so entirely covered over any other possible identity that we never doubted the heteronormativity behind the blackened face as if Power was in fact performing in black face, a stereotypical role of the virile hero.  

 

   The 1974 TV version delimited the mask and returned the hint of Zorro’s bisexuality, or at least his alternating between fop and heterosexual lover. And in the 1981 feature directed by Peter Medak, Zorro: The Gay Blade, bifurcated them into full-out-gay and heterosexual twins. The dangers of this, however, might have been to simply stereotype the gay Zorro while turning the straight one into the film hero. Fortunately, Medak forced the athletic “masculine” twin to remain basically in bed with a sprained leg, while allowing his gay brother to run around the country to engage in heroics, mostly off stage. He focused instead of how the straight characters in this film might be seen to harbor gay tendencies, forcing them to enact various gay stereotypes while freeing up the actual gay figure to go about his heroics and, finally, to appear in drag, attracting straight men in a manner that made one question their sexual predilections or, if nothing else, their definition of the female sex. If by film’s end Medak had again split the two into identifiable individual beings again, befitting the restrictions of Hollywood, he at least asked certain questions about homosexuality and heterosexuality that challenged the values purported in Mamoulian’s version, and even extended those permitted in Niblo’s 1920 version.

      Zorro, in short, has remained a puzzle, a mix of the effete gay Spanish “old” world and the new American masculinity of the West, a figure that did quite find its match again until later superheroes such as Superman and Batman, both also costumed and masked individuals, each with their form of a loyal friend like the first Zorro’s Bernardo.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2024

Don McDougall | The Mark of Zorro / 1974 [TV film] || Peter Medak | Zorro: The Gay Blade / 1981

what does it mean to have a gay twin?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Taggart (teleplay, based on the screenplay by John Taintor Foote and the original story by Johnston McCulley), Don McDougall (director) The Mark of Zorro / 1974 (TV film)

Hal Dresner, Greg Alt, and Don Moriarty (screenplay, based on the story by Johnston McCulley), Peter Medak (director) Zorro: The Gay Blade / 1981

 

      Before I discuss the Peter Medak version from 1981, I should mention the other The Mark of Zorro, the ABC television film of 1974 starring Frank Langella.

     Basically, it repeats Moumalian’s 1940 version except that this Zorro keeps his dual identities secret until the last moment, allowing the fop and lover to at least coexist throughout most of the film, hinting once more of a comfortable bisexuality. The TV version also features a far more complex relationship that Don Diego (Langella) develops with Don Luis’ wife (Louise Sorel) so that Diego can more closely keep an eye on Don Luis’ (Robert Middleton) and Captain Esteban’s (Ricardo Montalbán) activities.

     Given the inability for most heterosexuals—and homosexuals, for that matter—to truly understand bisexual behavior or the complexities of a tormented homosexual unable to fully come out of the closet—although in the case of earlier Zorros, it is the heterosexual who is unable to fully “come out”—the creation of a pair of Vega twins obviously resolved what appeared as the original film’s implausibility. By first introducing the Spanish educated Don Diego Vega, called home to discover his father’s recent death (a tortoise, so we are told by the evil Captain Esteban, had startled his horse leading the man to fall to his death), the story is able to establish a womanizing hero without confusing the audience as evidently Mamoulian had imagined his theater goers might be. No double life for this Don Diego (George Hamilton) is truly necessary. His Zorro and his own character are so much one and the same that even Esteban (Ron Liebman) immediately suspects his childhood friend and, we later learn, his female lover has suspected from the start.

      In order to allow for the “other” side of Zorro’s historical character, the “poof” who in the original Niblo version Diego pretends to be and the “fop” Mamoulian’s Zorro feigns, the writers and director serve up Diego’s twin brother, Ramón (also Hamilton), who instead of being sent to Spain to learn traditional forms of swordplay and horsemanship, was sent by his father to sea in order to “make a man of him”: “It’s said the navy makes men; well, I’m living proof that they made.” Identifying now more at British, Ramón now calls himself Bunny Wigglesworth, and is a far more flamboyantly effeminate gay man than the original, snuff-sniffing Zorro could have allowed himself to be.

      His arrival is perfectly timed with Diego’s injury as having jumped from a first story of Algalde Esteban’s home, and spraining or breaking his leg, he is his frustrated in continuing the struggle for justice that he has just undertaken after having discovered that his and Ramón’s father was the original Zorro.

 

    His twin may seem ready to take over the role they have inherited, but only by replacing plum, avocado, cherry, green, and finally even yellow perfectly accessorized capes and robes for the original’s Zorro’s bleak black and exchanging the sword for a whip, hinting that perhaps Bunny has taken up some of the British sailors’ S&M habits

     Yet, oddly this film almost loses interest in the gay brother once he has taken up the role. We hear of his many-colored robes mostly from hearsay, and the movie fortunately does not give us a constant dose of limp wrists and hisses which might make it almost unbearable; what we know of Bunny’s behavior is reported only by Esteban. And indeed, director Medack appears to be more interested in the private sexual kinks of the film’s straight figures than in its obvious gay one.

      Visited by Esteban’s sexually voracious wife Florinda (Brenda Vaccaro) when her masquerade party is destroyed by the visit of Zorro and her husband’s response, she jumps immediately into his bed, suggesting that it must lonely there each night. Diego’s response is not what we might have expected: “Sometimes Paco [Diego’s loyal comrade, equivalent to the first Zorro’s Bernardo] has nightmares and I let him sleep with me.”

      Soon after—Florinda not even having time to escape—Esteban himself pays a late night visit to Diego, mostly to vent his frustration over Zorro’s appearance at their party and his escape. When he sees his friend in bed, he wonders momentarily whether Diego himself might be Zorro, and knowing that the bandit has hurt himself in the jump, requests that Diego stand and walk for him. When Diego protests that he has seen him walk for most of his life, Esteban again utters an unexpected comment: “You always do it with such manliness that I never get tired of watching you.”

      Even Ramón, upon his return, explains who he is to his brother, who cannot quite recognize him, by describing himself as a former “roommate.”

      Later, after the gay blade has made several conquests of his tax collectors and compañeros, Esteban brings Diego a poster of a traditional sketch of the masked Zorro, making the ridiculous claim that now that they have a sketch they surely find him. Again wondering if the eyes of the sketch might not match Diego’s, he suggests that his friend “act gay,” demanding that he speak in a hiss, flap his arms, walk a swishy manner, etc. By requiring the supposedly straight men act out the gay stereotypes, the film’s “real” gay figure seldom has to reveal himself as just that.

 

     And near the end of the film, when Diego attends another masked ball at Esteban’s and Florinda’s hacienda—having secretly demanded all the guests to appear as Zorro—Ramón appears in drag, introduced as Diego’s cousin from Santa Barbara. Esteban dances with her and is so completely entranced by her, that he appears to actually have in love with the talk buxom blonde. At one moment, he takes Diego aside, beginning his sentence, “Your cousin is not a woman,” before finishing the sentence with a stage pause, “she’s a goddess.”

      In short, the film seems far more interested in exploring the subterranean gay emotions of the two boyhood friends, Diego and Esteban (whose lives openly parallel those of Judah and Messala in Ben Hur, another Fred Niblo 1920s film), than it is in representing the exploits of Bunny Wigglesworth.

      Moreover, when it comes to Diego’s exploits with the woman he loves, the unflappable social reformist Charlotte Taylor-Wilson (Lauren Hutton), Diego, laid up with the leg injury, sends his gay brother Zorro in his stead. Despite his outrageously queer identity, the lady claims her love for him and admits that she would do anything that he asks of her, hoping quite obviously that it might be of a sexual nature. In this instance, Bunny takes over the role of Sebastian’s wife in Mamoulian’s film, to suggest that she might go shopping with him since there are new prints and colognes just in from Spain.

      More importantly, when, after he has healed, Diego pays her a visit, she appears to have also seen through his disguise, perceiving him as Diego and suggesting that at first she thought there were two of him but that she has now realized that they are just two sides of one man who is changing,” nearly reiterating my comments about the Niblo version of Diego Vega.*

      Given her remarkable perceptions about the inner turmoil of one man coming to self-discovery, —even Diego admitting that he has discovered that he can now be “bulnerable,” she comically attempting to correct his mispronunciation—it is almost unfortunate that the actual gay twin need show up again after he has bid farewell in order to save his brother from the firing squad. But then Hollywood isn’t good at leaving things unanswered or allowing a film to suggest issues to which it truly doesn’t wish to attend.

    By film’s end the gay and straight have been properly bifurcated and we have returned to Mamoulian-land, the director to whom this film is dedicated, and the film has become so self-consciously corrective and conservative that it sends it major characters off to live in Boston.

      Yet, whether knowingly or unknowingly this comic film has come so very close to Niblo’s vision of Zorro that it is a shame it couldn’t admit to the fact that bisexuals do exist and that even heterosexuals can find themselves torn by their own subliminal queer urges. In any event, I’ll gladly accept what Medack offered, a film about a gay man in which he not only doesn’t die but saves his straight brother(s).

           

* I made the comments about Niblo’s film before seeing Zorro: The Gay Blade this morning, having first seen it when it appeared in theaters but having completely forgotten almost all its events.

 

Los Angeles, July 6- 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

 

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).

Fred Niblo | The Mark of Zorro / 1920

zorro as bisexual

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene Miller and Douglas Fairbanks (screenplay, based on the story by Johnston McCulley), Fred Niblo (director) The Mark of Zorro / 1920

 

      Douglas Fairbanks’ Don Diego Vega goes about with a frilly handkerchief in his limp hand, making regular use of his snuff box, and repeating, as he stands with slouched shoulders and droopy eyes, that he is fatigued. He pays utterly no attention to the beautiful Lolita Pulido (Marguerite De La Motte), whom his parents have insisted he should marry, and invites her and her family to his home while he is away at his country hacienda. In short he demonstrates absolutely no interest in Lolita as a female; she might as well be a potential new roommate rather than a bride. And she herself describes him to her family as not being a man, but a fish, which today’s urban dictionary defines as “A drag queen giving off female impersonation where you can't tell they are even a man; also being able to hid the male essence,” and has long simply long been an obscene slang word for a woman.

     His father Don Alejandro Vega (Sidney De Gray) and his childhood mentor Father Felipe (Walt Whitman) are all embarrassed for what has become of the boy they sent off to Spain for an education. And all the villains of the work, Sergeant Pedro Gonzales (Noah Beery), Captain Juan Ramon (Robert McKim), and the California Governor Alvarado (George Periolat) perceive him as a neutered landowner who cannot possibly pose a threat, precisely what he would like them to believe.

      We know, however, that he is also Zorro, the masked man in black, and in that role is everything that Don Diego is not, a brilliant swordsman filled with nearly endless energy, a great horseman, and a distinctive lover, which Zorro proves by immediately visiting Lolita after she has left Don Diego’s company, and despite his reputation as a dangerous outlaw, immediately gaining her love and exciting her to new possibilities in her otherwise closeted life.

 

    Yet the way Niblo’s script and direction separates these two different aspects of the same man for so much of the narrative suggests that this man or fish embodies both identities. He can neither be said to be one or the either, an impotent poof or a heroic lover. Both are purposely given equal weight in the 1920 version of the film, necessary for him to help both identities survive and to keep his any notion of true identity constantly in question, both for the figures of the story but for the audience as well. The adventure of the narrative, indeed, depends on his constant shifts between the two.

     No other characters have significant meaning, the landowners merely serving as passive participants in their war against the corrupt government which continues daily to tax the poor peons and landowners alike, whipping or even killing anyone who disobeys their demands.

       Only one person is aware of his moment-to-moment transformations, his servant Bernardo (Tote Du Crow), whose tongue has been removed as punishment, making him unable to tell anyone of his friend and master’s constant metamorphoses. But he is more than simply a silent observer, like the bosom friends of other such masked superheroes, Jimmy Olson to Superman’s heterosexual nerdy Clark Kent, Tonto to the sexless Lone Ranger, and Robin to the Boy Wonder to Batman, he is more than a mere “partner,” but a symbolic lover who helps his companion by keeping him abreast of events, and facilitating his return to his secret hideout with its numerous secret rooms and passage ways. He is the link between the two worlds and identities that his friend/master inhabits. I come back to these companion roles later in my essays.

      Niblo’s character, it is important to remember is far more that simply “foppish,” the way in which we might define Rudolf Valentino’s character, Monsieur Beaucaire of four years later. Don Diego is clearly homosexual whose intentions to marry are simply in obedience to custom and parental desires. And that, in itself, is utterly fascinating. For there is no obvious reason that in Diego’s attempt to cover for Zorro that sexuality need be part of the equation whatsoever. He could still be a weakling, a nerd like Clark Kent, a man without political concerns, and a fop whose major joys in life include resting, taking snuff, and doing magic tricks and sleights of hand—all of which would cover well for Zorro’s athletic and intellectual abilities. Sex need not have anything to do with it. Indeed, as in Tyrone Power’s portrayal of Don Diego in the Rouben Mamoulian directed 1940 version of the story, such a character may actually prefer the company of women.

       In Niblo’s wonderful interpretation of Johnston McCulley’s 1919 story “The Curse of Capistrano,” however, the character’s homosexuality is positioned as a central aspect of Fairbank’s characterization. Why, given the macho culture that both Don Diego and Zorro in habit, was such an added aspect of Don Diego’s character deemed necessary? I would argue that structurally it is necessary.

      Don Diego is not simply a ruse which a supposed real character more like Zorro has chosen to protect himself, but is central to the thematic that dominates this work. It is Spain, after all, that has so changed this child of the wild west. And the battle of selves in this work represent the struggle between the innocent, unlearned, ineffective, American raw masculinity—and all the patriarchal associations of that vision—and the educated, skilled, experienced, manipulative European effeteness—and the associations which gather around those words.

      The character Don Diego/Zorro is now both and of both worlds. And it is precisely his ability to contain those contrary identities which make him such a remarkable hero. I’d argue that this story was intended to be, almost destined to be a serial picaresque in which the two sides of the mirror (itself a standard trope of homosexual identity as I discussed in my essay on The Student of Prague of 1913) would inherently have continued to share the stage ad infinitum like the two television series that played from 1957-1959 with Guy Williams playing the heroes and again in 1990-1993 with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Duncan Regehr playing the major roles. Although there were “final” unmaskings in these series as well, the basic tenant of the series was that Don Diego / Zorro would go alternating forever as long as the series lasted.

      Obviously, in a film the unmasking must come far earlier, but Niblo intuitively continues the two identities as long as possible, only allowing Fairbanks to reveal himself at the very last moment when Lolita and the Pulidos are jailed and it is necessary to bring together the downtrodden natives and for the once-wealthy landowners to rise up against the corrupt California government and save them from death. But even then we know that both of the figures, homosexual and heterosexual, will remain within the character, as he produces a handkerchief, the major symbol of his homosexuality, to unsuccessfully hide his final heterosexual kiss with Lolita. What Don Diego has learned in Spain will remain with him in his marriage to the US West. His home, if nothing else, will be both an acculturated and cultured spot in the middle of the wilderness.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).