RetroClips

Adapted from Johnston McCulley's pulp serial "The Curse of Capistrano," this was Fairbanks's first costume swashbuckler after a decade of contemporary comedies, and its success reoriented the rest of his career toward the swordfights and derring-do he's remembered for. Fairbanks did the bulk of his own stunt work and fencing here, athletic enough that decades later Bob Kane cited this exact film -- the mask, the cape, the double identity of a foppish nobleman hiding a masked vigilante -- as a direct model for Batman.