The Elton Corporation

A nobleman's son vows revenge after pirates murder his father, so he infiltrates the pirate band to destroy it from within. Douglas Fairbanks produced, starred in, and drove this swashbuckler, performing his own stunts including the famous slide down a sail on the point of a knife. The film is one of the earliest feature-length pictures shot entirely in two-strip Technicolor, and the limited red-and-green palette gives it a storybook look unlike anything else from the silent era. Fairbanks pushed the budget to roughly $1.3 million, an enormous sum at the time, which limited the profit even though the picture was a hit. The Black Pirate is a landmark of color filmmaking and one of the great action spectacles of the 1920s. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Adventure · Action · Silent

A swaggering gaucho leader in the Argentine Andes falls for a mountain girl, but his head is turned by a woman known as the Miracle Girl of a mountain shrine. Misunderstanding her spiritual hold over him, the mountain girl betrays him to the authorities, and the Gaucho must escape to save the shrine and the priest who sheltered him. Douglas Fairbanks produced, wrote, and starred, and his then-wife Mary Pickford appears in a cameo as the Virgin Mary. The film was shot at the height of Fairbanks's box-office clout, with lavish sets and a budget to match, though he chose to film it in black and white rather than the Technicolor of The Black Pirate. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.

Adventure · Drama · Silent

Douglas Fairbanks' sequel to his 1921 hit The Three Musketeers, and the last of his great swashbucklers. He plays D'Artagnan, racing to protect the rightful King of France from the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and the masked prisoner who may hold the secret of the throne. The Iron Mask is a part-talkie, one of the few films in which Fairbanks spoke on camera, and his farewell to the silent action hero he had defined for a decade. The stunts are fewer than in his earlier pictures, and the tone is darker, with a tragic ending that surprised audiences used to seeing him win. Allan Dwan directed, and the production was mounted with Fairbanks' usual ambition. Published in 1929, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Adventure · Action · Silent