Rassegna stampa di Douglas Fairbanks

Fairbanks, il cui vero nome era Douglas Elton Ulman, era nato a Denver in Colorado nel 1883. Figlio di un avvocato ebreo, viene allevato dalla madre dopo il divorzio dei genitori e a 12 anni esordisce già in teatro, proseguendo poi la sua carriera a Broadway. Il matrimonio con Anna Beth Sully, figlia di un industriale, da cui nascerà nel 1909 Douglas junior, lo indirizza verso l'attività imprenditoriale, ma la sua fine lo riporta al teatro. Interprete per antonomasia dell'americanismo e incarnazione baldanzosa del suo ottimismo conquistatore - da qui il soprannome di "Dr. Smile" - fu dal 1916 al 1926 il divo più popolare dello schermo. Con D. W. Griffith, che l'aveva fatto esordire alla Triangle nel 1915, con Mary Pickford (sua moglie dal 1920) con la quale costituì una coppia celeberrima e mitica di "ambasciatori di Hollywood", e con Charlie Chaplin fondò nel 1919 la United Artists (Artisti Associati), per la quale interpretò una seconda serie di film avventurosi tra cui Il segno di Zorro (1920), I tre moschettieri (1921), Robin Hood (1922), Il ladro di Bagdad (1922-23), Il pirata nero (1926 a colori), estendendo universalmente la propria fama. Alla terza serie, quella della rapida decadenza causata dall'avvento del cinema parlato, appartengono tra l'altro La bisbetica domata (1929), l'unico con la Pickford che lo riportò allo Shakespeare degli esordi in teatro, e Le ultime avventure di Don Giovanni (1934). Anche il figlio, Douglas Elton Jr. (New York 1909-2000), è stato attore di qualità, interpretando numerosi film di successo tra cui Gloria del mattino (1933), Il prigioniero di Zenda (1937) e Sinbad il marinaio (1947). Douglas Fairbanks senior è morto in California, a Santa Monica, nel 1939.

In 1940 the fledgling Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art published the first two volumes in what was meant to be a series of monographs on film history: a study of the director D. W. Griffith, written by the library's founding curator, Iris Barry, and an appreciation of the actor Douglas Fairbanks, written by the British journalist Alistair Cooke.
It's no coincidence that MoMA chose to begin its version of film history with these two figures: if Griffith was the first modern filmmaker, then Fairbanks was a plausible candidate as the first modern movie star. With his boundless energy and incandescent smile, Fairbanks counts among the earliest major performers to emerge, not from the one- and two-reel films that had been the norm in the nickelodeon days, but from the feature-length film as it began to develop around 1912.
From the vantage point of the 21st century, we may find it hard to identify with nickelodeon stars like Dustin Farnum and Francis X. Bushman. Their personalities seem remote and restricted, their gestures too broad and too big, the emotions they express too heavy and pious, still smothered in Victorian values. But in Fairbanks we recognize a contemporary: a bright, open-faced young man who moves quickly and naturally, who lives in a world of speed and mass communication that is recognizably our own, who aspires not to the tragic martyrdom of the Victorians but to immediate pleasures and ordinary happiness.

This is the performer whose development is traced in “Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer,” an extraordinary, well-produced set of 10 features and one short film that arrives on Tuesday from Flicker Alley. These aren't the more familiar costume epics from Fairbanks's later career — several of which have been issued in fine editions by Kino International — but rather the modern-day comedies that first established his screen personality.
In “His Picture in the Papers,” the earliest (1916) film in this collection, Fairbanks plays Pete Prindle, the mildly rebellious son of a Kellogg-like health-food magnate. Pete hopes to get some publicity for his father's appallingly bland product line by performing a stunt — any stunt — that will get the family name mentioned in the New York press.
The film still has the frantic pace and slapstick humor of a two-reel comedy, but Fairbanks is already taking advantage of the extended feature format (in this edition, the movie runs 62 minutes) to develop his personality in asides that have no direct bearing on the plot. When he goes to visit his fiancée, he's so eager to get to her second-story apartment that he climbs right up the front of her building, an early manifestation of a careerlong aversion to taking the stairs.
For Fairbanks, a dedicated amateur gymnast, such moments of physical exuberance came naturally. On “His Picture” he was teamed for the first time with the director John Emerson and the screenwriter Anita Loos (the future author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”), and their collaboration extended through eight more films, three of which are included here: “The Mystery of the Leaping Fish,” a bizarre short with Fairbanks as a drug-addled detective named Coke Ennyday; the western comedy “Wild and Woolly”; and the Ruritanian adventure “Reaching for the Moon.”
Working with Emerson and Loos, Fairbanks (who contributed substantially to his own scripts, often under the pseudonym Elton Thomas) elaborated the character audiences came to call “Doug”: an energetic striver, of middle- or upper-middle-class origins, whose romantic notions and passionate enthusiasms (for the cowboy life in “Wild and Woolly,” or a fantasy of royal origins in “Reaching”) are first presented as comic but ultimately allow him to save the day.
This pattern reaches one of its high points in “A Modern Musketeer,” a 1917 feature that was one of 11 films Fairbanks made with Allan Dwan, the great master of early film form. Long available only in an incomplete print, the movie was restored in 2006 with footage found by the Danish Film Institute and makes its first appearance on DVD with this set.
In it Fairbanks plays a Kansas go-getter whose obsession with Alexandre Dumas drives him to ever more preposterous acts of romantic gallantry. In the end he is able to unleash his inner swashbuckler when, during a visit to the Grand Canyon, he is called on to rescue a young woman (Marjorie Daw) from the clutches of an outlaw gang.
Dwan's early command of match-cut editing — the apparently seamless presentation of action across a series of shots — is shown off to tremendous advantage here: Fairbanks seems to cut through space like an arrow in flight, a pure line of strength and beauty.
“A Modern Musketeer” begins with a winking prologue in which Fairbanks presents himself in full costume as D'Artagnan, tugging at his false mustache and adjusting his wig to assure his audience that Doug could indeed be found somewhere beneath the shrubbery. Fairbanks was testing the waters for what would be the next development in his career, the transition to period adventure films that began with “The Mark of Zorro” in 1920.
With “Zorro,” Fairbanks inverted his successful formula. No longer was he an ordinary individual who dreamed of being a hero, but a hero (Zorro, the masked scourge of corrupt officials in Colonial California) who disguised himself as an average guy (Don Diego, the foppish son of a landowner). The reversal, of course, only made the fantasy seem more potent: “Zorro” began a line of superheroes with secret identities that remains very much (perhaps too much) with us today.
The Flicker Alley set offers “Zorro” in a glisteningly sharp print made from a source close to the camera negative, and the other titles in the box have been mastered with consummate care, even when the source material is not perfect. The movies are presented with period-accurate color tinting and accompanied by appropriate scores performed by some of the leading figures in silent-film music, including Philip Carli, Robert Israel and Rodney Sauer, the leader of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
A 32-page booklet offers an essay by Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta, the authors of “Douglas Fairbanks,” a new pictorial biography that the University of California Press is releasing next week. This one's a keeper. (Flicker Alley, $89.99, not rated.)
Da The New York Times, 2 dicembre 2008