The Black Pirate

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.