This movie is great fun to watch, like you would expect from a genre movie such as this one. It has all the typical adventurous, action and comedy elements present to make this a great swashbuckling movie. Add to that Douglas Fairbanks in good shape and you have a classic unforgettable genre movie!
Douglas Fairbanks is totally great in this one. He looks, acts, breaths, eats like a real superstar. He handles all of the athletic action in the movie really well. It's not hard to see why this man was THE swashbuckling hero of the '20's.
The movie is really great looking, with many grand looking sets. Really great looking stuff! (though obviously all fake.) Something you would normally expect to see in a D.W. Griffith movie. The movie also has some silly looking but yet great early special effects, toward the ending of the movie.
The story has all the ingredients needed for such a genre movie as this one; an heroic main character, a love interest, stereotypical villains and lots of fun and action. Especially toward the ending the movie starts to become greatly adventurous after a sort of slower middle and good first part. It's of course all rather simple and formulaic but this is also what makes the genre so great. You just always know what to expect. It's good simple fun that's professionally and well made, that's also beautiful to look at.
Also definitely fun to see how much of this movie was later used again in Disney's "Aladdin". Some, mostly action sequences, are obviously almost directly copied.
A great fun movie, from swashbuckling-specialist director Raoul Walsh.
9/10
http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/
