He was called 'The King of Hollywood' and if any actor during the Silent Era could credibly claim to be more popular than Charlie Chaplin, it was Elton Thomas Ullman, better known to his adoring public as Douglas Fairbanks.

The star of forty-eight movies, including some of the greatest action films of all time, Fairbanks was a superstar before the word existed, and along with Chaplin and his wife Mary Pickford, one of the three highest-paid and most-popular actors of his day. On his honeymoon with Pickford, Fairbanks and his bride drew crowds of 300,000 in Paris and London. At home in their mansion, dubbed 'Pickfair,' the two threw lavish parties and routinely entertained the world's most sought-after celebrities. To receive an invitation to Pickfair was to receive the social blessing of Hollywood royalty.

Certainly no one of his era, maybe no one ever, enjoyed stardom more than Fairbanks did.

But Fairbanks was more than just a regular feature of the gossip columns and party circuit. He was also a fine actor and created the modern action hero in a series of swashbuckling adventures showcasing an infectious joie de vivre and extraordinary flare for stuntwork.

As a co-founder of United Artists, Fairbanks had complete creative control over his pictures, producing a string of action-adventure classics—The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, The Black Pirate, among others—before saying farewell to the genre with The Iron Mask. On each of these movies, he worked not just as an actor but also as a writer (under the name Elton Thomas) and producer.

Fairbanks practically invented the action-hero genre in film with 1920's The Mark of Zorro. Admittedly, his Don Diego Vega—Zorro to you—had no supernatural or extraterrestrial powers, ala Superman or the Hulk, but he was the first film hero with a secret identity and hideaway, a costume, a mask, a sidekick and a backstory, not to mention a compulsion to carve a 'Z' on the anatomy of oppressors and evildoers while fighting for truth, justice and the old Spanish California way.

Later, Fairbanks' Zorro would inspire Bob Kane as he created the comic book crime fighter, Batman.

After a successful career on Broadway, Fairbanks made his cinematic debut in 1915 with The Lamb, a comedy-western about a meek city slicker who single-handedly defeats a band of Mexican bandits.  The film set the tone for his career—light-hearted action—and during the following year he established himself as one of the silver screen's biggest stars.  Including his uncredited cameo in the D.W. Griffith epic Intolerance, Fairbanks appeared in a dozen movies in 1916.  One, The Good Bad Man, is apparently lost (a pity since this was the first of the eighteen movies Fairbanks wrote as well as starred in), but the others are readily available.

ClassicFlix boasts a fine collection of the best of these early films in Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer.

Among the eleven movies included in this collection are four of my favorite Fairbanks films, must-sees for any fan of the actor or the era.

The Matrimaniac co-stars Fairbanks with one of the silent screen's best comediennes, Constance Talmadge, with the two eloping over the objections of her father and a former suitor. Along the way, Fairbanks steps off the train to fetch a minister, then spends the rest of the movie trying to catch up with his bride-to-be when his return is delayed. The result is a wild, stunt-filled romantic comedy that no doubt later served as a blueprint for the get-me-to-the-wedding-on-time storylines of Harold Lloyd's Girl Shy and For Heaven's Sake.

In Wild and Woolly, a thoroughly modern Arizona town redresses itself as an Old West frontier hamlet to solicit a lucrative investment from a railroad baron (Fairbanks) with a yen for Wild West action.  The staged gunfights and faked Indian attacks are as exciting as the ones of his over-active imagination, but when a corrupt Indian agent (Sam De Grasse) takes advantage of the situation to launch a real attack, Fairbanks proves his courage and rides to the rescue.

Written by the legendary Anita Loos, who later penned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the screen adaptation of The Women, this may be the best of the pre-swashbuckling Fairbanks features and is a National Film Registry selection.

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is easily the most oddball entry in the entire Fairbanks oeuvre.  This comedy short features a drug-addicted private eye who can barely rouse himself long enough to mainline some of the cocaine he keeps in a large pot on his desk, much less make it down to the beach where smugglers are hoping to land a shipment of opium.

The gem of the collection, though, is The Mark of Zorro, the first of Fairbanks' pure swashbucklers.  As I mentioned above, Zorro not only set the pattern for action-adventure movies for decades to come, but determined the formula for the rest of Fairbanks' career.  Already a star of comedies, audiences responded with such enthusiasm to this new role that he cheerfully ended up playing variations on it for the rest of his career.

Which leads to the next great Fairbanks collection ClassicFlix has on offer: Including The Mark of Zorro again, The Douglas Fairbanks Collection features six of the last nine silent movies of Fairbanks career, and they represent his best.

After one last foray (The Nut, 1921) into the kind of modern comedy that had previously defined his career, Fairbanks spent the rest of the silent era making lavish historical action-adventures he's now known for, beginning with The Three Musketeers (1921).

Even if you haven't read it or seen one of its hundreds of film adaptations, you probably have some sense of the story: a young Frenchman named d'Artagnan pals around with three of the king's elite guardsmen—the musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis—wielding swords, battling bad guys, and getting into all sorts of scrapes. It's two tons of fun, with memorable heroes and villains, lots of action and pretty girls, and very little angst to slow you down.

Fairbanks, as usual, was in fine fettle. At thirty-eight, he was too old to play the twenty-one year old d'Artagnan, but once the swordplay begins, you don't care. With grace and gusto, he fends off a dozen men, scales walls, leaps through windows, and saves enough energy to woo the girl and outsmart the evil Cardinal Richelieu.

Fairbanks followed The Three Musketeers with Robin Hood (1922), one of the most iconic roles of his career.  You are no doubt familiar with the outlines of the story—King John usurps the throne while Richard the Lionhearted is away fighting the crusades, and Robin Hood steps in to protect the downtrodden Saxons from John's oppression.  It's a fine movie, with plenty of action and stunningly lavish sets, but at times you see Fairbanks struggle a bit to perfect the formula.  As with Musketeers, Robin Hood is a little too interested in palace intrigue for its own good.

With his next film, though, Fairbanks would reach the pinnacle of his career.

Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad (1924) is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Douglas Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet, while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer.

The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with Chaplin's City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and probably the best action-adventure movie made before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood. If you're only going to see one Fairbanks movie in your life, see this one.

After Bagdad, Fairbanks returned to his roots with Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925) where he played a dual role, Zorro and his son, Don Cesar de Vega.  Although it did not break any new cinematic ground, this sequel is in some ways superior to The Mark of Zorro.  Still, while Fairbanks gave his audience its money's worth, I get the sense that he was gathering his energy for the most technically-ambitious film of his career, The Black Pirate (1926).

There never was a better movie pirate than Douglas Fairbanks—not Errol Flynn, not Tyrone Power, not Johnny Depp.  The story of a young man who infiltrates a crew of pirates to avenge his father and save a princess, The Black Pirate is filled with all the swash you'd ever care to buckle. Donald Crisp, who would later win an Oscar for How Green Was My Valley, plays Fairbanks' lone ally onboard the ship.  Sam De Grasse (who also played villains in Wild and Woolly and Robin Hood) plays the ruthless pirate captain.  And Billie Dove plays the lovely damsel in distress.

Working with a primitive two-strip color process, it was the third color feature in film history.  Indeed, if you have a Blu-Ray player, I recommend you opt for the deluxe stand-alone version of The Black Pirate.  While there is a nice copy of the film included in The Douglas Fairbanks Collection, the Blu-Ray features a recently rediscovered color print of the film and is well-worth the effort.  (In fact, color makes The Black Pirate seem less alien to those of your friends and family who might otherwise resist dipping their toes in the silent waters, and could serve as a good introduction to this underappreciated film era.)

Last among the collection is The Gaucho from 1927.  The story of an outlaw battling both an invading army and a plague epidemic, The Gaucho earns the most mixed reviews of Fairbanks' silent films.  His biographer, Richard Schickel dismissed it as 'the flattest of his big-scale adventure-romances' while TV Guide hails it as the 'richest performance of his career.'  Fairbanks himself was 'uneasy' about it, but in retrospect, one can see it as an early effort at distancing himself from two-dimensional heroes and creating a flawed man who succeeds despite himself, definitely worth a look.

Not included in The Douglas Fairbanks Collection, but available from ClassicFlix, is Fairbanks final silent film, The Iron Mask.  In 1929, with talkies already well established, it proved to be the perfect cap to his action hero career.

Set twenty years after the events of his 1921 hit, The Three Musketeers, The Iron Mask reunites d'Artagnan (Fairbanks) with Athos, Porthos and Aramis to rescue the rightful king of France from prison. The movie features plenty of action, as you would expect, but is also a touching buddy movie and commentary on retirement and death. Fairbanks even recorded a spoken prologue, the first time his adoring fans ever heard him speak on film.

'When d'Artagnan bids farewell to his earthly existence in the final moments of The Iron Mask,' Jeffrey Vance and Tony Maietta wrote, 'Fairbanks also appears to be bidding farewell, not only to that character, but to Zorro, the Thief of Bagdad, the Black Pirate, and all the other romantic roles of his swashbuckling past. It would have been a superb swan song to his life and career.'

With the dawn of the sound era, Fairbanks put down his foil and returned to the genre that had given him his start, comedy. He made four movies, including one, The Taming of the Shrew, with his by-then estranged wife, Mary Pickford, then retired from acting altogether.

He later received a commemorative Oscar in recognition of his work as the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and for his 'outstanding contribution ... to the international development of the motion picture.'

Douglas Fairbanks died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of fifty-five. His last words were 'Never felt better.'

Stuffed with fluff with buttons for eyes, the Mythical Monkey writes about classic movies as often as a blog-typing sock monkey can. Check out his website, A Mythical Monkey Writes About the Movies.