Don Q, Son Of Zorro

Don Cesar de Vega (Douglas Fairbanks), a young Californian, is in Spain to complete his education. One day while demonstrating his bullwhip skills to friends, he accidentally flicks the cap of Don Sebastian (Donald Crisp), a member of the Queen's Guard. Don Sebastian forces Don Cesar into a sword fight which is interrupted by a rampaging bull. After saving his opponent from being trampled, Don Cesar, pursued by a mob of admirers, vaults into the royal gardens, where he meets and is immediately smitten by the beautiful Dolores (Mary Astor). The young man soon finds himself competing with Don Sebastian for her hand.

Behind closed doors at a royal ball, Archduke Paul of Austria (Warner Oland), a visiting cousin of the Queen of Spain (Stella de Lanti), goads Don Sebastian to the point where the guardsman loses his temper and runs him through. Framed by his rival for the slaying, Don Cesar successfully feigns suicide. The identity of the true killer is known only to Don Fabrique (Jean Hersholt), an ambitious man in possession of an incriminating note written by the Archduke as he lay dying.

Don Fabrique blackmails Don Sebastian into issuing him hush money and political favors. Meanwhile, Don Cesar, who is holed up in the ruins of the de Vega family castle, sends a letter to California detailing his plight to his father, the almost legendary figure known as Zorro (also Fairbanks). Zorro resolves to help his son and embarks for Spain.

Dolores is on the point of succumbing to family pressure and signing a marriage contract with Don Sebastian when Don Cesar startles everybody by making a sudden appearance at the window, whipping the contract to shreds, and disappearing. "He lives!" exults the girl.

After first vanquishing and then posing as Colonel Matsado (Albert MacQuarrie), an officer the Queen has commissioned to capture him, Don Cesar returns to the family castle, where he is joined by Don Sebastian, Don Fabrique, and Zorro. There, Don Cesar, side by side with his father, battles off a legion of guardsmen, single-handedly bests Don Sebastian in a duel, and produces the note, extracted from Don Fabrique, that will establish his innocence. After Don Sebastian is arrested for the Archduke's murder, Don Cesar embraces first his father, Zorro, and then his beloved Dolores.

In preparation for DON Q, SON OF ZORRO, Fairbanks spent weeks mastering the Australian stock whip in order to perform a variety of onscreen tricks designed to accomplish everything from snuffing out a candle to snapping a wedding contract out of somebody's hands, a stunt that would furnish the film with its peak moment ("He lives!").

Mary Astor is introduced via a side view of her character posing for a sculptor, an appropriate angle and situation for showcasing one of the silent cinema's most classically beautiful profiles. Donald Crisp, who doubled as DON Q's director, furnished the film with the most interesting and vulnerable heavy in the entire Fairbanks oeuvre. (Given the unattractiveness of Warner Oland's interpretation of Archduke Paul as an eternally smirking, petty sadist, Don Sebastian's rash stabbing of the Archduke emerges as less heinous than it was intended to be.) At heart a frightened man who is well aware of his inadequacies, Don Sebastian was portrayed by Crisp with more restraint and depth than the script required.

Fairbanks is Fairbanks, nothing less. He renders Don Cesar as the most contagiously effervescent and almost absurdly good-natured of his many period heroes--a marvelous innocent, a man who performs parlor tricks with the exuberance and pleasure of a child. His first line of dialogue sums him up: "It is a beautiful life, Robledo." And when he says it, you believe it.

The role of Don Cesar de Vega, aka Don Q, combines the best of the Old and New Worlds. He is sufficiently old-fashioned and romantic to woo his inamorata with guitar and verse, but he's also spontaneous and direct enough, as a Westerner, to conduct his courtship on a straight line to its goal, in contrast to his rival, Don Sebastian, who discreetly asks Dolores's father for permission to come courting. Fairbanks is to be further congratulated for bringing to the screen a Spanish hero, albeit a Spanish-American one, who is absolutely free of macho affectation and arrogance.

Better than the original, DON Q, SON OF ZORRO incorporated much more action and violence than THE MARK OF ZORRO did, but practically none of it is ugly or cruel. Within the Fairbanks filmography, DON Q comes after THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1924), his greatest picture, and before THE GAUCHO (1927), in which he gave his finest performance--but DON Q is more Fairbanksian, pure and simple, than either of those films or, for that matter, any other film in the Fairbanks canon.

So Variety, on its own commercial terms, was not being myopic when it proclaimed: "From an out and out picture entertainment standpoint it is a better picture than THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, not as spectacular as the latter by far and by many thousands of dollars, but it is Fairbanks as the public wants Fairbanks." The Hollywood trade paper was prescient: DON Q, SON OF ZORRO was a smash hit. (Violence.) leave a comment