This movie has the unique status of having been a sequel in novel form even before the movies started. Dumas père wrote The Man in the Iron Mask to exploit the success of The Three Musketeers, and no doubt Hollywood figured they might as well follow the novelist's example and produce another movie with Douglas Fairbanks as d'Artagnan. Here, as always, Fairbanks is the pre-eminent swashbuckler, leaping onto his horse from windows, climbing trees acrobatically, and swordfighting against great odds, even when the story line calls for him to have aged at least twenty years. The costumes and sets are lavish, and the structure of the silent filmin the version I saw provided with a competent voice-over narrator, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.is almost coherent, though not entirely. It helps to know the story in advance. I would have preferred to see it in its original form, with intertitles.
Review of The Iron Mask
