[Note - due to a glitch, some of the reviews for the MSN DVD column this week may not yet be up when you click on the links.]

Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (originally released in the U.S. as Stairway to Heaven) is as gorgeous and romantic as films come. The film opens with a celestial prologue and narration providing a sense of cosmic comfort of someone watching over it all, of some divine authority in charge. It plays like the British answer to the opening of It’s a Wonderful Life, which came out the same year (is it coincidence that the post-war era inspired such a need for heavenly affirmation?), but immediately swoops down from the majestic calm of the stars into the terror of World War II and a bomber pilot giving his farewell to life over the wireless as his plane burns furiously around him and he prepares to make a blind leap without a parachute. Powell gives the scene terrible beauty - the wind whips the cabin, the fire flickers around his face, the clouds have a texture so palpable they look like you could step out into the sky and walk to heaven on them - and an emotional power to match.

Kim Hunter and David Niven fall in love

Unabashedly romantic, beautifully textured in warm color and cool monochrome, and brilliantly poised on the edge of fantasy and reality, Michael Powell’s 1946 A Matter of Life and Death is the first essential DVD release of 2009…. It’s a perfect romantic fantasy and a stunning creative achievement (“Ah! We are so starved for Technicolor up there,” quips the conductor as the gray monochrome of the afterlife blooms into the almost surreal hues of Earthly color), powered by the passion for life and love.

I write further on the film for Parallax View here and review the DVD for MSN here.

Also new this week in the TV section is Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.0, which features the first ten episodes of the show’s final season (the concluding episodes begin this month on the Sci-Fi Channel) plus the previously released “prequel” film Battlestar Galactica: Razor. The original Battlestar Galactica of the seventies was a simple show of heroic humans fleeing the evil Cylons, robots built to destroy the human race. That simplicity was tossed through the airlock for this gritty, rough and ready revision, but it flies into unexpected territory in the first ten episodes of the fourth and final season. One-time villain Baltar (James Callis) becomes a messiah, or at the very least a holy prophet. Our soft-speaking President (Mary McDonnell) resorts to dictatorial measures to quell dissent. Military career man Apollo becomes the advocate for civil rights. Meanwhile a civil war is erupting among the Cylon race, the newly “revealed” Cylon sleepers in the Galactica fleet face an identity crisis and the final conflict seems inevitable. This is still the best science fiction series on TV, a drama that thrives in the atmosphere of moral ambiguity, spiritual mystery and survivalist reality, which is only enhanced by the down and dirty production design.

Here’s a digest of the other DVD releases featured on my MSN column:

Movies: Baghead, The Wackness and Pineapple Express:

The Judd Apatow factory refreshes the stoner comedy in this hilarious and unexpectedly visceral hybrid road movie/action thriller. Seth Rogen is a wise-cracking process server and James Franco is his friendly neighborhood dope dealer, a sweet, stupid, emotionally ebullient guy with the innocence of child (albeit one who is baked to the gills), amiable stoners who witness a cop killing and flee a murderous drug lord (Gary Cole, perfect as always) and his hired assassins. The screenplay by Rogen and Evan Goldberg (from a story co-written with producer Apatow) doesn’t really take us anywhere we haven’t been before, but it offers a sly take on stoner culture and an accidental buddy film that works…

TV: The Tudors: The Complete Second Season, Nip/Tuck: Season Five Part One and Secret Diary of a Call Girl: Season One:

Showtime has found its niche in original programming – sex with style and a little wit –and “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” captures that balance with a lightness and slickness, if not quite ambition. Billie Piper, once the Doctor’s companion on “Doctor Who,” is now a paid companion, a high-class London escort who really enjoys her work. It’s ostensibly based on a memoir by a genuine professional escort, sort of a “Happy Hooker” for the 21st century, a colorful distraction with a lot of sex, plenty of lingerie, a little flesh and a few minor complications that pass for drama.

Special Releases: Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach:

This dryly satirical comic drama of a film director who flits between two lovers on a trip to the coast is the best film yet from South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who has made a career with stories of emotionally arrested men and tolerant women.

Blu-ray: Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Caligula and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor:

Isn’t this what Blu-ray was made for?… Bertolucci’s production is sweeping and lavish – this was the first foreign production granted access to film within the walls of the Forbidden City – and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro uses color like a painter on an epic canvas. At the center of the spectacle, however, is the story of a boy raised to believe in his own divinity and a man who learns to become a simple human being against the backdrop of China’s volatile history.

The weekly column goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment.

My accounting of 2008 DVD Essentials (Movie Edition) is now live on Parallax View.

This is not a celebration of the most impressive special editions, the most stunning transfers or the best supplements. This is my list of what I consider the essential movies that debut on DVD – from long awaited classics to rare cult discoveries – done up right in worthy editions. That doesn’t mean great supplements (though those are always appreciated) but worthy transfers and fine mastering.

Forgive the U.S.-centric spin. Some of these may have been released in other countries with other region codes, but not everyone has an open-code, region free, PAL-converting DVD player. And those of us who do don’t always keep on the releases in other regions. I have a hard enough time keeping up with what’s coming out here.

This is a decidedly subjective list, influenced by personal taste, excitement of discovery (or rediscovery) and rarity. While films that have been previously available on VHS or are periodically revived in retrospectives or cable showings are still valued DVD releases, the release of something unavailable in any form is an even greater cause for celebration, and that is reflected in my subjective hierarchy.

#1 - The Films Of Budd Boetticher

The cycle of films made by Budd Boetticher with star/producer Randolph Scott and writer Burt Kennedy include some of the greatest American westerns of the fifties – or ever, for that matter. Until this year, that was a contention that many folks had to take on faith, as these films were difficult to see at best. Apart from Seven Men From Now, released on DVD a few years ago by Paramount, none of these collaborations were on DVD and the selection arbitrarily released on VHS years ago were part of a failed experiment in low-cost/low-quality tapes from Goodtimes, whose tapes were recorded in the substandard EP (extended play) mode. And of course, the two widescreen films in the cycle were only ever seen on TV or video in pan-&-scan versions, which ill-served the integrity of Boetticher’s films. Has any major American director been treated with such shabby neglect on home video as Budd Boetticher?

See the rest of the countdown, plus a healthy recollection of honorable mentions, at Parallax View here.

There’s no new column at MSN this week but there are new DVDs, which I have anticipated and included in the two-week column currently up on MSN Entertainment. There’s also something a little different about the Christmas Week releases, which are almost exclusively limited to 2008 features: most of them were actually released on December 21, a Sunday, presumably to give businesses a few extra days to sell and/or rent the discs before Christmas.

The brain trust of "Burn After Reading"

The highlight of the limited release week is the Coen Bros. Burn After Reading, one of their more playful projects, much lighter and significantly slighter than their previous film, the dark, Oscar-winning thriller No Country For Old Men, but put together with such perfection that you can’t help but be won over. Who else but the Coens could get away with a comedy where a major character is violently, messily killed.

George Clooney is the ostensible lead as a charmingly glib and very married Federal Marshal whose job never seems to interfere with his numerous affairs, but France McDormand drives the ensemble comedy as a desperately single woman determined to get a plastic surgery makeover at any cost. Her motives aren’t exactly pure of heart – she just wants money for some cosmetic surgery that she can’t understand why her HMO won’t cover – and her obsessive drive to get money at any costs leaves a lot of collateral damage. Her plan revolves around a computer disc of what she believes are state secrets (they are actually the romanticized memoirs of a deluded low level CIA agent, played to perfection by John Malkovich with a blank expression meant to look incredulous but actually makes him look like a doofus) and her efforts to sell them to the highest bidder. The characters all think they’re involved in an espionage caper and the Coens direct it with a straight face, not playing punchlines as much as letting the absurdity arise from the disconnect between the sober stylistics and the utterly ridiculousness of their shenanigans.

After the darkness of “No Country For Old Men,” the Coen Brothers eased up with this deadpan espionage farce played out by small fish convinced that they are in deep waters…. It may be a lark but it is pitch perfect and the performances are priceless, from John Malkovich as a doofus CIA vet with delusions of adequacy to Brad Pitt as a cheerfully idiotic personal trainer.

The DVD is reviewed here. I also reviewed the film for the Seattle P-I here.

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My picks for the best DVD release of 2008 are now up at MSN.

Here’s my number ten pick:

10. “The Dark Knight: Two-Disc Special Edition”: “The Dark Knight,” the second film in Christopher Nolan’s character reboot of the masked avenger, is the best of the superhero movies of the year, a pulp tragedy with costumed heroes and villains taking the roles of mythic gods and monsters and with an urban noir aesthetic to the melodrama. The DVD delivers just the kind of featurettes on stunts and special effects that fans love in a smart, sharp little package. To give credit where it’s due, the deluxe editions of “Iron Man” and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” are even more impressive packages, with a surfeit of behind-the-scenes material and imaginative supplements delivered by enthusiastic filmmakers. But while they get points for creativity, “The Dark Knight” is the better film. Needless to say, the Blu-ray editions of each are the stuff that Blu-ray dreams are made of.

And my number five TV pick:

5. “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Complete Series”: For four years, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were TV’s coolest cold warriors: Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, top agents of U.N.C.L.E. (the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, of course). Hatched in the era of James Bond and “The Manchurian Candidate,” the show mixed espionage plots and high-tech gadgetry with a trace of sardonic humor and the continental charm of Vaughn’s dashing Solo. The entire run is creatively packaged in a box set designed as a secret agent attaché case, and Warner fills it with the kind of supplements more often associated with James Bond films: hours of featurettes, bonus interviews and the funky ephemera that the cult show inspired.

For the rest of the picks - all ten movies DVDs, five TV sets and one Blu-ray disc - just follow the link to MSN here.

Criterion's debut release: "Citizen Kane" on laserdisc

Criterion’s name is synonymous with the gold standard when it comes to presenting the definitive editions of classic and foreign cinema on home video. The company began in the laserdisc era and essentially defined the “special edition” presentation as we know it with releases like Citizen Kane (their first laserdisc release ever) and the follow-up 3-disc DVD (which expanded the supplements) and the “director approved” collaborations with Martin Scorsese (whose commentary on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) set the bar for director commentary tracks and inspired many aspiring filmmakers). They’ve carried their loving care for classic and contemporary movies to DVD, finding vintage supplements for classic films and contributing to the critical record with their efforts. What gives the Criterion stamp meaning is not that they create the “best” DVD editions around, but that that they lavish their efforts on films that don’t get that kind of attention from the studios.

Thus, the announcement earlier this year that Criterion was going to start producing Blu-ray discs was considered evidence that the new format was indeed something that serious film folk should consider. It’s not just for The Matrix and Transformers and The Dark Knight, but for The Godfather (Paramount), Casablanca (Warner) and No Country For Old Men (Miramax).

The smeared world of "Chungking Express"

The four titles that Criterion adds to the Blu-ray format limn the span of the gamut of their interests: The Third Man (classics from the canon), Chungking Express (contemporary international), The Man Who Fell to Earth (cult favorites) and Bottle Rocket (American indie). All the supplements from their definitive DVD editions are carried over to the Blu-ray disc, with the notable exception of the booklets (which are represented by smaller, thinner booklets with only some of the essays and interviews of the original DVD offerings), and the films are newly remastered for the 1080p high definition standard. What you get is a sharper, stronger image that is also more sensitive to preserving the textures of the chemical process of film. Yes, I’m talking about film grain, that reality of celluloid that modern films have been so effectively been scrubbing away in the new film-to-digital-and-back post-production process. It dances across the sc screen of The Third Man with such clarity you think something must be wrong. It’s startling, because we’ve seen so little of it on DVD, but the presence also warms the image, makes it a little more organic. Criterion isn’t the first to do this - The Godfather and Casablanca embrace the grain also – but it really jumped out at me in The Third Man and started me reevaluating what constitutes a proper restoration and mastering standard for classic cinema. It’s not quite so obvious in Chungking Express, but then that film, with its smeared colors and stuttery motion and images pushed and pulled to the extremes of film registration, is all about the texture. Criterion’s Blu-ray preserves that texture so well you can’t imagine seeing it without that kind of clarity.

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Murnau, Borzage and Fox actually came out last week, but I didn’t receive a copy in time for that column, so it’s featured this week. And yes, it is a beauty of a set, a labor of love and a gift to all lovers of silent cinema (and, for that matter, anyone who loves great cinema of any and all kinds). The box set features two silent films by F.W. Murnau and ten complete features by the much less well known Frank Borzage, one of cinema’s great romantics and forgotten giant of silent cinema.

At the inaugural Academy Awards in 1927, Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven, won for Director and Adapted Screenplay, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise won for Cinematography and “Artistic Quality of Production” (a sort of high-art “Best Picture” award that disappeared the next year), and the two shared Janet Gaynor’s Best Actress award. This confluence of directors, studio and era is essentially the grounding for this year’s answer to “Ford at Fox.”

Mary Duncan and the boys: "City Girl"

Sunrise is the only film on this set to have been previously available on DVD and it’s been newly remastered for this set. City Girl (1930), the third of Murnau’s three films for Fox, makes its long awaited debut and it’s a beaut. A late silent film made in a period while the studios were rushing to sound, it’s a rural romance between a sincere young man (Charles Farrell) from a Minnesota farm, the harried dreamer of a waitress (Mary Duncan) from Chicago who falls for his sincerity and honesty and accompanies him back to the farm as his wife - much to the displeasure of the man’s father, a hard, severe man as cold as the Minnesota winters. It’s a simple story with moments of unabashed beauty and freedom, as when she runs through the wheat fields of her new home, a burst of innocence and joy from a woman who thinks she’s found her dream come true. Unlike Sunrise, Murnau did not have carte blanche with this film and it was completed in his absence, as he had grown disenchanted with Fox and the American studio system and left to make Tabu in the South Seas.

While Sunrise was a financial failure, it reaped other rewards for Fox. Murnau the studio’s artist in residence and every director came by to watch him work and soak in the expressive qualities of his style and cinematic sensibility. No one benefited more than Frank Borzage, a good director who became great as he found the imagery and approach to match his own romantic impulses. In Seventh Heaven (1927), perhaps not coincidentally featuring Sunrise stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, his style burst forth fully formed and irresistibly passionate. Farrell stars as a Parisian sewer worker gives a home to a destitute street girl and the two fall in love in the seventh floor garret, but before they can marry he leaves to fight in WWI. Borzage tells his story as much through visual metaphor as narrative convention, expressing in images what words cannot. Their daily ‘telepathic’ communication across hundred of miles defies logic, but Borzage makes it believable in the context of his story which takes place largely on the spiritual realm.

This collection finally brings his holy trinity of romantic classics to DVD: Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Lucky Star. All starring Fox’s eternal young lovers, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, they are among the most lush silent films ever made and the most entrancing celebrations of the redemptive power of love in all of cinema.

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Superhero films have been getting increasingly sophisticated and decidedly darker as they become (for better or worse) a full-fledged genre. With Batman Begins, writer/director Christopher Nolan (drawing inspiration from the revisionist Batman comic books by Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb) rebooted the Batman mythos for the big screen, bringing the often lighthearted hero back to the shadows, both figuratively and literally. Now, with the origin story out of the way and the obsessive hero established, Nolan delivers a pulp epic with mythic overtones for the darkest of comic book heroes with The Dark Knight, a pulp tragedy with costumed players and elevated stakes and terrible sacrifices.

Heath Ledger leaves a legacy

In a Gotham City that is part violent gangster thriller of the thirties and forties and part modern metropolis with a rotten foundation under its magnificent cityscape, The Batman (Christian Bale) has cast an aura of fear across the underworld with his vigilante war on crime. He doesn’t trust many people in the corruption-riddled halls of justice, but he takes a chance on the man called Gotham’s White Knight: crusading new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, who brings a hint of grinning arrogance to Dent’s passion).

Shambling into the battle comes The Joker (the late Heath Ledger). With his stringy hair, greasy make-up over the smile carved into his cheeks and garish, street-battered suit, Ledger gives us a volatile psychotic far removed from Jack Nicholson’s showboating exhibitionist in Tim Burton’s “Batman.” He works over his sardonic dialogue in a rumbling wise-guy whine and off-balance patter, his tongue darting in and out like a lizard, his slumping posture so at ease in the chaos of his capers it’s disturbing.

Nolan delivers the expected set pieces for a big screen superhero spectacle, from a sharp bank heist executed (in every sense of the word) with impersonal efficiency by a masked gang to a high-speed ambush in an underground tunnel to a nearly incomprehensible rescue operation where the good guys are working at cross purposes. But The Dark Knight is also a tighter, smarter, more focused film than Batman Begins and Nolan has become a more effective storyteller.

It’s one of the best American movies of the year (I review it on my blog here) and a terrific DVD.

The “Two-Disc Special Edition” includes “Batman Uncovered: Creation of a Scene,” a collection of over an hour of featurettes on the making of key scenes (like blowing up the hospital – for real! – and a real life stunt jump from a skyscraper more thrilling than the finished scene) and versions of the six scenes shot in IMAX format presented in their original aspect ratio…. The Blu-ray edition presents the IMAX version of the film (the IMAX scenes fill the entire widescreen TV frame)…

I review the DVD in my MSN column here.

Also new this week is Olivier Assayas’s breakthrough film Irma Vep in a new “Essential Edition” from Zeitgeist:

French director Olivier Assayas satirizes the French film industry and pays affectionate tribute to the joys and frustrations of filmmaking in his offbeat 1997 comedy. Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung plays herself in this playful lark about a company trying to remake the silent film classic Les Vampires with an unstable director (aging New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud) and a power struggle within the crew.

My DVD review is here.

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“Follow the drugs, and you’ll find dealers and users. Follow the money, and you have no idea where the case will take you.” So began the first season of HBO’s compelling tale of cops, crooks, and the social and bureaucratic forces that both divide and bind them, and the begining of an epic series that set the high water mark for television drama. I’m not generally one for sweeping statements, but The Wire is the best original show ever made for television.

The task force follows the evidence in Season One

Created by David Simon (co-creator of the landmark cop show Homicide: Life on the Street), it’s marked more by the mundane realities of procedure and politics (on both sides of the law), and the intricate details building cases and connecting the dots of evidence, than by drug busts and shoot-outs. The first season follows the single investigation of an inner-city drug dealer and the violence surrounding his ambitious expansion. Baltimore police detective McNulty (Dominick West), a hard-drinking divorced cop whose dedication is endangered by a big mouth that gets the better of him when he’s indignant, and D’Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.), the sharp young nephew of West Side drug lord Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris). D’Angelo opens his eyes to the street politics when he’s demoted to slinging product from the towers in the slums and the show opens our eyes into both worlds. The deliberate pacing and attention of complex detail marked it off from every other crime show on TV, and Homicide star turned director Clark Johnson can take some of the credit for setting the tone and style in the first two episodes (he did similar honors on the pilot of The Shield).

Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale confer

The second season opens with hard-drinking loose cannon McNulty shuffled off to the harbor patrol (his punishment for bucking the chain of command) and the special squad commander Daniels (Lance Reddick) consigned to the police archive dungeon. Then McNulty fishes a corpse out of the water and starts a whole new investigation rolling. The team is back in business, and this time they leave the drug crimes of the street for human smuggling and corruption on the docks… and it’s all kicked off by a spat between a petty Irish cop and the local dock workers union. The drama brings us into the complexities of organized crime on the docks, the desperate tactics and petty scams run by an underemployed dock worker’s union in a faltering economy, and the victims sacrificed by international crime lords in the human cargo trade, but Simon and company continue to follow the drugs as well. Avon Barksdale’s drug operation is now being managed by Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). His big ambitions sets the foundation for the third season, which pulls the story the task force back into the affairs of Barksdale’s expanding drug operation. But what makes this season so compelling is the doomed, inspired, and utterly unthinkable solution to the drug problem that Simon proposes and then illustrates, with startling frankness, both the pros and cons of his modest proposal.

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My review of the 1965 New Wave omnibus film Six in Paris, recently released on DVD by New Yorker, is up at the Turner Classic Movies website.

The omnibus film – a feature made up of original short films by different directors, organized by a theme or a place – flowered in the sixties, especially in Europe, where directors of international repute were gathered to contribute short films on a variety of themes. Films from Boccaccio ‘70 (1962) and RoGoPaG (1963) to The Witches (1967) and Spirits of the Dead (1968) brought together the cream of European directors, and even today the omnibus film occasionally resurfaces, as with Paris Je t’Aime, comprised of 18 shorts by 18 directors shooting stories in 18 separate neighborhoods (the “Arondissements”). You can trace the inspiration for that particular cinematic love letter to the city of lights directly back to Six in Paris, a film produced by Barbet Schroeder and directed by six of the most interesting and distinctive young filmmakers working in France in the 1960s. The French New Wave had exploded in the late fifties, when Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge brought a breath of cinematic freshness and stylistic excitement to the largely staid French film industry. Barbet Schroeder, who was born in Tehran to European parents, grew up in Central Africa and Colombia, and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, had been an integral part of the movement. His ambition was ultimately to direct, but the filmmaker found his greatest contribution to the vibrant film scene as a producer of Eric Rohmer’s early films.

The inspiration for Six in Paris came from Schroeder, who hit upon the omnibus format as a way to work with most exciting young filmmakers in France and to explore the possibilities of shooting with new lightweight 16mm cameras. “It was the beginning of 16mm with direct sound,” he explains in a new interview on the DVD, and he hoped that the new technology would offer the young filmmakers the freedom of shooting quickly and spontaneously, on location and in the streets. Schroeder approached six directors he wanted to work with and offered them the challenge of making a short film in this new filmmaking paradigm. They had carte blanche to develop their own stories, so long as it all took place within a single neighborhood of Paris. It was something of a revolutionary idea, as even the low-budget productions of the French New Wave had all been shot on 35mm. The idea of mixing documentary and fiction techniques was primary in his Schroeder’s mind, and each director took up the challenge with essentially the tools but his own distinctive approach

Read the complete piece here.

Douglas Fairbanks gets his head shrunk in "When the Clouds Roll By"

The eleven films on Flicker Alley’s five-disc set Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer are more than just a terrific collection of the films from one of the preeminent stars of silent cinema. Spanning the year 1916-1921, the films show Douglas Fairbanks developing from mere mortal film star, an actor with both comic grace and athletic flair, into the first action hero of the movies. All of the early films of this collection show Fairbanks in modern dress and contemporary mode, the urban guy with a chivalrous streak and an enthusiasm that bursts out of him in feats of gymnastic joy. Films like His Picture in the Papers (1917), Flirting With Fate (1917) and Wild and Woolly (1917) are more comedies than adventures and Fairbanks is a romantic comic lead whose athletic talents are an extension of his gags, much like Chaplin’s slapstick grace, Keaton’s daring play with massive mechanical props (like a moving steam engine) or Harold Lloyd’s thrill stunts. He’s dapper, charismatic and plays everything with a smile so wide you can’t help but be charmed by his joie de vivre, but he’s decidedly a modern urban hero, or at least a variation on it, the fop who transforms into the man of action of The Mollycoddle (1920). In When the Clouds Roll By (1920), one of the more unusual comedies of the set, Fairbanks is a superstitious young swell who is the unwitting victim of a decidedly sadistic psychological experiment by a doctor of dubious moral character trying to drive him to suicide, with the all-too-willing help of the man’s butler and building super (they both get far too much pleasure out of the misery they inflict on this sunny young man). Based on a scenario written by Fairbanks himself, it’s a strange and surreal comedy with an entire scene that place within his stomach (his dinner, looking very much like a primeval version of the Fruit of the Loom guys, acts up as he tries to digest a late meal) and a dream sequence that turns Fairbanks’ acrobatic feats into a slow-motion ballet that looks like something out of a Jean Vigo film.

Fairbanks as D'Artagnon in "A Modern Musketeer"

With A Modern Musketeer (1917, directed by Allan Dwan), you see Fairbanks try on a different kind of persona in the prologue. Fairbanks winks to the audience as he strides into frame in long, curly hair and the flouncy, flamboyant costume of D’Artagnon, but when he leaps into an acrobatic swordfight his smile is no longer one of knowing parody, but of athletic joy. It’s a brief scene that soon gives way to the modern musketeer incarnation, but it looks ahead to the action movie spectacles of the twenties that will make him a screen legend, represented on this set by The Mark of Zorro (1921), a dashing adventure tale of Old California’s Robin Hood. In his secret identity as the foppish Don Diego, Fairbanks slouches, shuffles, and gives the dim, dull air of a bored dilettante who can hardly be bothered to wake up – but clues us in on the charade with smiling asides and playful parlor tricks and games. Behind the mask of Zorro, however, he comes alive with a zesty smile and an acrobatic performance, vaulting through windows and over walls and declaiming his pantomime speeches with every muscle in his body – you can almost hear him through the silence.

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