RetroClips

The stunt was faked, brilliantly: the sail was pre-slit, Fairbanks gripped a fixed blade rigged to a hidden pulley-and-counterbalance system his own brother Robert engineered, and his weight on the rig lowered him smoothly to the deck while the canvas tore open around him -- airplane propellers off camera billowed the sails for effect. It's also one of the very first color feature films: shot entirely in an early two-strip Technicolor process, only the third feature ever to use it, requiring two strips of film fused back-to-back, so thick and heat-sensitive the picture would warp out of focus during projection. Fairbanks, in his forties by then, still did the stunt work himself, taping his arms and legs to avoid rope burns.