The Black Pirate (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 5/13/2018

The Black Pirate was our seventh and last film from 1926, and the fifth film we've seen starring Douglas Fairbanks -- the first since 1922's Robin Hood. It is a landmark of a sort, in that it is the first film we've seen that was filmed entirely in color. Color in this case means 2-strip Technicolor, which is the same process that was used for parts of 1925's Ben-Hur. As with that film, the color doesn't look completely natural, but it is obviously an early example of a coming change that would end up being almost as significant as the addition of sound. Unlike the switch-over to sound, though, which happened over just a few years, the industry change to producing almost exclusively color films took place over several decades. In fact, looking over my list of potential upcoming films, I'm not sure we'll start seeing full-color films on a regular basis until the late thirties.

The film itself is a straight adventure movie, not too different in style from Fairbanks' Robin Hood, but simpler and more focused. Fairbanks is in full swashbuckling mode here, perhaps a little less hyperactive than in Robin Hood, but still doing a lot of jumping and climbing and sword-fighting. He plays the victim of a pirate attack who, in order to survive and get back to civilization and avenge his father (who died in the attack), temporarily becomes the pirate leader -- an accomplishment that seems like it ought to be a little more difficult than portrayed. His main antagonist is another pirate, played by Sam De Grasse, who was also Prince John in Robin Hood. Billie Dove plays the love interest, but I imagine it was a rather unrewarding role for her, as she is given very little to do. This film holds up decently well as entertainment, but I'm not sure it would be terribly well-known today without the element of color. That novelty never quite wears off, and the sight of a blade dripping red with fake blood certainly has a kind of immediacy which has no exact parallel in the films that we've previously seen.

Next week we return to 1927, picking up with our fifth film from that year, the monumental Napoleon directed by Abel Gance. I have also updated the list (https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT) to add our planned films from 1928, including Speedy, which we saw at the Alamo in Winchester in 2016, and which I have decided retroactively was part of this project all along. Unfortunately I have once again exceeded pretty dramatically my goal of four films a year, but I am working on getting that back on track so we can maybe finish this project before Ben goes to college.