Zorro's Black Whip

Zorro's Black Whip is a 1944 Republic Pictures serial in twelve chapters, directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Wallace Grissell. Despite the title, the hero is not Zorro but a masked woman called the Black Whip, played by Linda Stirling. She is Barbara Meredith, a newspaper proprietress in the Idaho Territory who takes up the mask of her murdered brother to fight a villain trying to block statehood and seize control of the region. Republic could not license the Zorro character itself but used the name to capitalize on the 1940 Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. The serial is in the public domain.