Those rare souls who know anything about Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., probably associate his name with amazing stunt work in silent films. He is indeed justly known for that, but he should be appreciated for much more. Fairbanks, the great "swashbuckling" actor, was also one of the first important film auteurs, coming on the scene shortly after D.W. Griffith demonstrated the powerful effects a feature film could accomplish. Fairbanks put together a surprisingly coherent body of work, set a standard for film acting, and established conventions of film action (adapted from stage and page, of course) which have remained in place ever since.

In his films, Fairbanks embodied the American spirit, what I call practical romanticism: his characters were optimistic, hard-working, cheerful, openly affectionate toward friends and intimates, fond of domestic comforts but always seeking a new challenge, a new adventure. The Fairbanks hero is by no means perfect but is certainly laudable overall—the kind of person you'd want watching your back in a fight.

Fairbanks himself was no superman. Rather short, thin, and bandy-legged, he had a weak chin, high forehead, thin upper lip, and indistinct jawline—not the kind of face we associate with masculine resolution and heroism—yet he made no great effort to hide any of these presumed deficiencies. And that was the right choice, because his superficial physical limitations made his accomplishments that much more impressive.

The narrative formula for his work was set at the very beginning of his career as a movie star (he was 32 years old when he made his first feature), and Fairbanks seldom deviated from it until the talkies and the Depression made it no longer viable. Fairbanks typically plays an ordinary fellow, often one trapped in a dull office job, who yearns for adventure—and gets it but good. Alternatively, he might portray a spoiled rich swell forced by a series of disasters to prove himself a true American, a figure of grit, pluck, and resolve. The transformation of a meek or debauched weakling into a human dynamo became the hallmark of his work.

In The Lamb (1915), for example, his first starring role, Fairbanks played an effete Eastern snob battling Indians in the Wild West to save a girl who can't stand him. The films he released between 1915 and 1921 generally breezed by in less than 70 minutes. In brilliant and audacious comedies such as Wild and Woolly, The Nut, The Matrimaniac, The Mollycoddle, Flirting with Fate (in which a starving artist afraid to commit suicide hires someone to kill him and then changes his mind but has trouble getting the killer to quit), and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, the key elements of the Fairbanks persona were set forth: athleticism and grace.

Neither a particularly deep thinker nor a sensitive soul, in these early films he perfected a naturalistic acting style that transformed his deficiencies as a performer into assets. It also made him the biggest movie star in the world, as his naturalness made it easier for audiences to identify with him. The flattery of the audience in these films is indeed quite apparent, the idea being that any American could make a big difference in the world simply by summoning up enough grit and determination to make it happen.

In one sense, of course, Fairbanks was no ordinary American. He was an excellent gymnast, and he practiced one sport or another nearly every day for two decades, frequently working with professional coaches and world champion athletes. His fencing, according to a former French foils champion, was good enough to qualify him for the championship class. In training for The Three Musketeers he unofficially approached the world records for the standing high jump and the broad jump. He used a stunt double only once in his entire film career. Fairbanks was an extremely gifted natural athlete who trained with fierce dedication—not an ordinary guy at all. But in his aspirations, if not his natural gifts, he was not so different from the rest of us. His vision was thoroughly bourgeois; he was Everyman writ large. Audiences sensed that, and loved him for it.

Fairbanks was a highly innovative and meticulous producer as well as a superb performer, especially during the 1920s when he put together his best-known works, a series of ambitious, popular, costume adventures. This is the period of his career represented in the Douglas Fairbanks Collection, a DVD box recently issued by Kino Video, which includes six complete films and more than three hours of special features. In these features his seriousness of purpose became increasingly overt. As a result, they have less of the sense of fun and good cheer that is omnipresent in his earlier pictures, and to that extent they offer an incomplete picture of him. In compensation, however, these films place his typical protagonist in other milieus, suggesting that the virtues of the American way are in fact universal.

The films in the Kino set—Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, The Black Pirate, The Thief of Bagdad, The Mark of Zorro, and Don Q, Son of Zorro—are all delightful and wonderfully decent films. The Black Pirate in particular is visually gorgeous and was the first true color feature film, using a two-strip Technicolor process that still looks impressive today, even on television. These historical romances show how action films can reinforce wholesome values while presenting exciting fun, as opposed to many of today's action pictures, which slide so easily into despair and cynicism. Fairbanks' protagonists typically attain a rapturous joy in achieving things that are both very difficult and very good, and the films, as a consequence of this joy, are also easy and fun to watch, contrary to most people's impression of silent cinema.

In addition, these films increasingly brought religious themes to the surface of his work. Fairbanks was raised a Catholic, but he was divorced twice and seems not to have been much of a churchgoing man. His films, however, frequently included religious themes, and Alistair Cooke correctly observed in 1940 that Fairbanks' body of work showed him to be "a gymnast who was also an evangelist."

In The Gaucho, the title character (played by Fairbanks), a bold and callous leader of a gang of thieves, tells a Latin American priest, "You see, Padre, I get what I want—without the help of God and His Holy Book." The point of the film, however, ends up being his inexorable movement toward a religious conversion (accompanied, of course, by the mandatory heroic action plot involving freeing a community from vile oppressors). After some rather despicable behavior by the Gaucho, and his well-deserved infection with a ghastly disease called the Black Doom, he experiences a miraculous healing attributed explicitly to the power of prayer to the Christian God. In the end, the Gaucho tears down a sign proclaiming the laws imposed by a usurper from whom he has saved the town, replacing them with a copy of the Ten Commandments.

With the coming of sound to the movies, Fairbanks quickly realized that the stodgy camerawork required by the planting of microphones would make his sort of film simply impossible to produce. Moreover, he had a high, piping voice more appropriate to an accountant than an action hero. Hence, he chose to produce The Iron Mask as a fairly explicit swan song. Fairbanks' niece maintained that the film was "an expression of his religious philosophy," referring especially to the ending, in which the ghosts of D'Artagnan's friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis arrive to take their mortally wounded comrade to his eternal reward. Porthos reassures the hesitant D'Artagnan by saying, "Come on; there's greater adventure beyond." It is a profoundly moving scene, achieving a lyricism the likes of which the relentlessly chipper Fairbanks seldom permitted himself to express.

Fairbanks' life, unlike his movies, did not have a particularly happy ending. Ultimately, his infidelities and adolescent restlessness caught up to him, and he paid the price in the breakup of his marriage to Mary Pickford and the decline of his career. His last words, however—he died of heart failure in 1939—could have been spoken by one of his plucky heroes: "I've never felt better."

S. T. Karnick is senior editor for the Heartland Institute and an associate fellow of the Sagamore Institute.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.