THE KING OF HOLLYWOOD

By RICHARD CORLISS

The camera was in love with him, as long as he moved. And silent-film star Douglas Fairbanks was the man who put the movies in motion. He climbed trees, rain spouts, a snake charmer's rope, a church facade. (Take the stairs? What's the fun in that?) And then he would leap: from roofs or high windows; from a rock onto a distant tree; from a rampart onto a sheer castle wall 15 ft. away. Doug was a whiz with a rapier, a whip, a bola. He could somersault off a horse, trampoline from one speeding car to another. He was a fellow you literally could not keep down--a movie vision of young America on the ascendance in the decade after World War I.

He played heroes from foreign cultures (Robin Hood, Zorro, D'Artagnan, the Thief of Bagdad), yet he was always an American abroad, showing the Old World how to win the fair maiden, cure each injustice. And he'd do it with a laugh--at the fix he was in, at the bulky chore of filmmaking, at the sheer joy of being Doug.

The movies' most dazzling smile shines today, in a set of 10 features (all of Fairbanks' silent films from the 1920s) and two beguiling early featurettes that Kino video is releasing this week. The films, digitally remastered from archive prints, look beautiful in their pearly black-and-white tones--as does The Black Pirate (1926) in its surprisingly sumptuous two-strip Technicolor. The videos offer a reminder that Fairbanks was not just a star of young Hollywood; he was among its most ambitious producers. And he made some marvelous entertainments. The Mollycoddle, The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers and Don Q Son of Zorro display a wit and a zest that shame most of today's bloated adventure films.

Fairbanks was 32 and a Broadway light-comedy star when, in 1915, he was signed by the Triangle film company. Its most noted director, D.W. Griffith, was not impressed: "He's got a face like a cantaloupe, and he can't act." Both slurs were accurate. Doug's full-moon face and double chin made him a long shot for movie swoondom; and in closeup his stage-bred gestures looked like cheerleader antics. All he had was it--the gorgeous muscularity and infectious brio that made folks want to pay to see more. His exuberance turned out to be the key to a genre Doug virtually created: the adventure comedy. "Pictures were made for him," said Allan Dwan, director of 11 Fairbanks films. "The theater was too little."

He was lucky too when Griffith handed him over to the writer-director team of Anita Loos and John Emerson, who established his film character: half Tom Sawyer, half Teddy Roosevelt. They also devised the set pieces that made his name--as in the climax to the delightful The Matrimaniac (1916): his fiance is locked in a hotel room; the preacher is in jail; the police have chased Doug up a telephone pole; so he tightrope-walks on the telephone wires, persuades a lineman to plug in a conference call to the jail and the hotel, and voila, they're married!

By 1918 he was Hollywood's most popular male actor, outranking Charlie Chaplin; the top female was Mary Pickford, the cagey gamin called America's Sweetheart. A year later, the three stars and Griffith started their own company, United Artists. And in 1920 Fairbanks married Pickford. His Majesty the American had won it all.

Some silent stars, like Buster Keaton, swam outside the Hollywood mainstream. Fairbanks, though, was Hollywood--in his itch for control (he produced his films and wrote most of them), in his loving to be loved, in his taste for pricey grandeur. He ordered the biggest sets (Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood), the highest budgets (The Thief of Bagdad), the first epic film shot wholly in Technicolor (The Black Pirate). At times this largeness slowed the films' pace; you wait an hour for the stunts and the fun to kick in.

By the end of the '20s, talkies had taken over; Fairbanks sounded flutey and looked older in them. In 1933 he and Pickford separated. The swashbuckler was 50; another Roosevelt with a big smile was giving America a Fairbanksian jolt of optimism, and Doug was disconsolate. He told his son Douglas Jr. (by then a film star himself), "I've done everything--twice." Not just two Zorro movies and two D'Artagnans, but two careers, two marriages, too much work and play. He said he wanted to die quickly.

Fairbanks died early, at 56, but he had already written his obituary on film. At the end of the 1929 The Iron Mask, when D'Artagnan is killed, his spirit rises and he marches in heaven with the other Musketeers, their burly bonhomie still alive. And Doug is in the middle--smiling as if he'd just won the race, the fight and the girl.