The Iron Mask Reviews

What a shame that the main print available for The Iron Mask is the 1952 re-release that added an oppressive voiceover. If viewed in its original silent incarnation, I have the strongest feeling that it would be a vast improvement. But 1929 was the year of The Jazz Singer, and silent films were numbered. The Iron Mask feels like it should be the closing image of Douglas Fairbanks legendary career, and alternately like a great icon feeling uncertain about his place in the upcoming new all-talking world of cinema.

The Iron Mask is a sequel to one of Fairbanks’s great films, The Three Musketeers, and a speed-read through Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Victome of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, most popularly known for the segment dubbed “The Man in the Iron Mask.” This film reunites many of the supporting players from the 1921 Musketeers, and their various death scenes play like goodbyes to old friends. The Iron Mask also features Fairbanks fighting to maintain his swashbuckling persona, while acknowledging that his reign as king may be over, as this film features his lone death scene in the silent era.

And it would be a fitting, if bittersweet, farewell to the original king of daring adventure cinema if not for Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s decision to include a voiceover for his re-released version. The images play out in the heightened reality of silent film, and narrating their every move, thought and action creates a strange dissonance between what is happening onscreen and having it spoon-fed to us. The poetry and grace of silent acting and it’s dream-like logic is undercut. Yet there is Fairbanks in the center of it all, holding the film together and saying goodbye to his throne and still promising greater adventures beyond this point summarized in one of the final images of the film – the Musketeers reunited in heaven and walking into the great beyond.