Douglas Fairbanks gave perhaps the richest performance of his career in THE GAUCHO, one of his most underrated films. The most protean of his pre-sound protagonists, Fairbanks's outlaw Gaucho anticipated the "good bad man" who would gradually replace the flawlessly virtuous hero on
American screens.
After suffering a terrible fall, a child (Eve Southern) is saved from death by a Madonna (Mary Pickford) who appears to her in a vision. During the next decade, the site of the miracle becomes a shrine in the midst of a prospering city. Countless pilgrims visit the shrine to see the miracle girl
(Geraine Greear), who herself has acquired the power to heal.
One day, the peaceful city is invaded by the army of Ruiz (Gustav von Seyffertitz), a greedy, villainous usurper. No sooner have Ruiz's forces seized the city than they lose it to a band of outlaws led by a man known as "the Gaucho" (Douglas Fairbanks). The irreverent Gaucho is attracted to the
miracle girl, but his lust is stayed by her air of saintliness, which mystifies him. After his current flame (Lupe Velez), a mountain girl, stabs him in jealousy, his bleeding hand is grasped by a vindictive plague victim (Albert MacQuarrie), whom the Gaucho, earlier in the evening, had admonished
to commit suicide. Mortally infected with the plague, the Gaucho is about to take his own advice and shoot himself when the miracle girl arrives to cure him.
Ruiz retakes the city and jails the Gaucho. Awaiting execution, the outlaw escapes, and he and his men vanquish their foes. After returning the city to the benign care of the miracle girl and the local priest (Nigel de Brulier), the Gaucho, a better and wiser man, rides off with the mountain girl,
whom he has decided to marry.
"It did not have the grand sweep of his earlier classics," wrote Douglas Fairbanks Jr. about his father's penultimate silent film, THE GAUCHO, "and he was uneasy about it." Critics, then and now, were uneasy, too (in contrast to the millions of Fairbanks fans who flocked to the film)--including
Fairbanks biographer Richard Schickel, who deemed THE GAUCHO "the flattest of his big-scale adventure-romances. Indeed, it is hard to determine just what he thought he was doing here." Others will find it hard to determine what Schickel found lacking in the movie. THE GAUCHO's cinematography was
surely anything but "flat," boasting probably the most baroque, shadowy, and arrestingly intimate camerawork of any Fairbanks silent film.
As for the title character, he is the most rounded of Fairbanks's many men of action. At several points in the picture, Fairbanks temporarily suspends his customary state of cheerful hyperactivity and stops dead in his tracks, as if to illustrate the beautiful phrase from Poe's poem "To One in
Paradise," "...mute, motionless, aghast." The Gaucho's reaction when first confronted by the plague victim is exquisitely rendered by Fairbanks: he slowly rises to his feet, lowers his eyes in fear and revulsion, extends an arm, and wags his hand in a feeble gesture of horror and dismissal. Soon
thereafter, in another priceless interval of speechlessness, the Gaucho, drunk and lustful, is frozen by the mysteriously serene expression on the face of the miracle girl (one of the cinema's few convincingly saintly presences). And after the Gaucho is infected by the plague victim, Fairbanks
allows his public to see for the first time the wear and worry on his middle-aged face.
The Fairbanks body, however, was still that of a boy. Whether he is scaling walls, swinging from awnings, or shinnying up trees, the Gaucho's acrobatics are fully as dazzling as those of Robin Hood, the Black Pirate, et al. Even more impressive than the super stunts are the extraordinary series of
grace notes Fairbanks strikes in between them; his performance is one long dance. For example, as he is escaping from jail, the Gaucho's first step into freedom takes him out of a dugout and up to ground level, an action that is accomplished with a surprising, wrongfooted hop that is a pleasure to
behold. Elsewhere, in an empty chamber, he cases the joint with the grace, artifice, and bravado of a Nijinsky essaying the tango. Throughout, he performs a sexy series of tricks with an endless succession of cigarettes and matches that would be the envy of any sleight-of-hand specialist.
In THE GAUCHO, Fairbanks did not compromise his stock persona; he enriched it. As morally flawed as the title character is, he is still firmly rooted in the Fairbanks tradition of good nature and high spirits. This is exemplified by the sequence in which the Gaucho is in the process of frisking
his enemy, Ruiz's first lieutenant, and then heartily embraces him.
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