To be precise it wasn’t a modern Big Screen – this was in a concert hall rigged up as a movie theatre, rather than a purpose built cinema – but in all honesty that just added to the retro charm.

I was excited to see this among your tens. “Dreaminess” is an element of this I don’t think I properly emphasized in my review, but I think you’re spot on. I confess I probably wasn’t in a place to use all the superlatives I did here given that I’ve only seen portions of Fairbanks’ other movies. But I watched over half of Black Pirate a couple days ago and was definitely hooked.

I’m super envious of seeing this on a big screen (or for that matter ANY silent film).

Now that you suggest it, I think you’re right that late era Cruise does fall in the Fairbanks lineage: A much-appreciated craftsman/stuntsman who is a brand unto himself, producing and guiding the movies he stars in; maybe not as much as Fairbanks, but still clearly “his” movies. Top Gun Maverick = Thief of Bagdad???

But yeah, this is really quite great. (I will agree on the pacing, with the caveat that it’s a combination of pacing and dreaminess and being a silent film in the first place. But although I have no unpleasant sensation at all associated with it, I have *definitely* lost consciousness watching it.)

This and Black Pirate are awesome. Zorro’s also pretty good. The rest, uh, well, either way, Fairbanks’s action hero legacy is secure for all time.

Before THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, even! (In fact it’s amusing to note that these might well have been the first Epic Films I ever saw on a cinema screen).

It says something that I can remember bits and pieces from both films the better part of three decades later (Also that Douglas Fairbanks Senior remains a name to conjure with even a century after his heyday – and it’s interesting to wonder if Mr Tom Cruise consciously thinks of himself as following very much in Mr Fairbank’s footsteps, because there are a number of interesting parallels).