I picked up a couple DVDs of old silent movies this weekend, yielding me a total of five Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. films to get acquainted with. I started with The Mark of Zorro, the 1920 film in which Fairbanks established himself as Hollywood’s definitive action star. It was also the first Zorro movie ever made. Fairbanks picked out the obscure hero of a single pulp magazine story and turned him into an icon, to his own and the author’s great profit.

(Note to Hollywood: My books are still available. Better move now.)

Silent movies have to be taken on their own terms. Naturalism wasn’t what they were about. They were almost a form of interpretive dance, in which the actors used their faces, their eyes and their whole bodies to convey their “lines,” only sparsely supplemented by those black dialogue cards. The great D. W. Griffith did a lot of pioneering work using the camera to assist in his storytelling, but little of that kind of artistry is apparent in this film. Basically they set the camera in one spot and shot the scene in front of it.

Modern treatments of Zorro fall prey to Hollywood’s deep-seated need to be relevant and significant. Fairbanks had no such pretensions. He picked the vehicle because it offered lots of scope for the gymnastics at which he excelled, and that’s how he used it. There’s talk of “justice” and “oppression” (Zorro is described, among other things, as a defender of the “natives,” something I haven’t seen emphasized in the more recent adaptations, though I missed the second Banderas film), but that’s set dressing. It’s really a movie about a really agile guy running rings around the plodding villains, and laughing at them while he does it. It’s one notch of seriousness from being a full-fledged comedy.

And it’s a lot of fun, taken on its own terms.

This Zorro likes to smoke a cigar, by the way, and wears a false mustache along with the mask.

The Zorro we all know and love is, in fact, as much the creation of Douglas Fairbanks as of Johnston McCulley, the author of “The Curse of Capistrano,” the original Zorro story. McCulley’s character was called “Senor Zorro,” and he wore a sombrero and full-face mask (see the book cover at the top of the Wikipedia page). Fairbanks thought a flat Andalusian hat and a visor mask would look cooler. McCulley, being no fool, then revived the character in a series of new stories, and dressed him the way Fairbanks dressed. (At the end of the first story, as in the movie, Zorro’s identity became public knowledge and his chief enemy was killed. McCulley just ignored those elements in the new stories, stretching an author’s prerogatives almost to the breaking point.)

I used to wonder why the character was called “Zorro” (which means “fox”) when he wore all black. I think that’s partly explained by the poster for Mark of Zorro (scroll down on the Wikipedia page). You’ll note that Zorro’s headscarf and sash are a foxy red. However, red shows up as black on monochrome film, so everyone got used to thinking of Zorro as a man in black.

A sort of parallel case to Zorro (but more extreme) is the Cisco Kid, who started out as a vicious killer in a downbeat, ironic western story by O. Henry called “The Caballero’s Way.” Henry’s Kid was not Mexican but Anglo (his real name, we are told, was Goodall).

When Hollywood made the first sound movie of the story, starring Warner Baxter as the Kid (In Old Arizona, 1928), they made him Hispanic and softened his character, though keeping the basic plot. Over the course of many movies that followed, Cisco gradually evolved into a western knight errant, as far from O. Henry’s brainchild as could be imagined.

So here we’ve got one Hispanic hero, and an Anglo villain transformed into a Hispanic hero, both of whom became American film and TV icons.

Because we’re a racist, xenophobic country, I guess.