The Black Pirate is a 1926 American silent color adventure film directed by Albert Parker, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Donald Crisp, Sam De Grasse, and Anders Randolf.

After the first natural color films appeared in 1922, Douglas Fairbanks envisioned a color pirate film. However, he waited to start production until 1925. Once Technicolor had improved its filming and printing capacity, Fairbanks took financial risks due to the added costs and fragility of the film process. He also hesitated because color was rumored to distract from the narrative and strain viewers’ eyes.

To address these concerns, Fairbanks avoided Technicolor’s saturated tones and instead chose a restricted palette, inspired by Flemish painters and American illustrators who had popularized pirate themes in the early twentieth century.

His team spent months testing and refining color control for all on-screen elements, including the studio-created ocean. This focus on visual consistency also led to the simplification of the story, contributing to the film’s success. Fairbanks continued to deliver his signature acrobatic stunts.

The film achieved international success, notably for its colors, but suffered from the fragility of its two-strip laminated film. This issue prompted Technicolor to abandon the process and develop a more durable single-strip film, which was later used for some prints. The Black Pirate became both a commercial and technical milestone, showcasing Fairbanks’s influence, while also exposing the process’s limitations.

In his subsequent films, Fairbanks considered using Technicolor again but gave up on it for various reasons. In 1928, when Technicolor felt that it had overcome the difficulties encountered with The Black Pirate, it produced The Viking (1928) as a demonstration, for which Fairbanks' film would serve as a hidden model. Other successful films, including The Black Swan (1942) with Tyrone Power, and The Crimson Pirate (1952) with Burt Lancaster would further exploit the link he had imagined between pirates and Technicolor.

Plot

thumb|thumbtime=7|The Black Pirate|left

Pirates capture, badly maul, and loot a ship. After relieving the ship and crew of valuables, the pirates fire the ship, blowing up the gunpowder on board, sinking her. While the pirates celebrate, two survivors wash up on an island: an old man and his son. Before dying, the older man gives his signet ring to his son. His son buries him, vowing vengeance.

The Pirate Captain and Lieutenant bring some crew to the other side of the same island to bury some of their plunder. They then plan to murder the other pirates: "Dead men tell no tales." But first, the son appears as the "Black Pirate", who offers to join their company and fight their best man to prove his worth. After much fighting, the Black Pirate kills the Pirate Captain. The Pirate Lieutenant sneers and says there is more to being a pirate than sword tricks. To further prove his worth, the Black Pirate says he will capture the next ship of prey single-handed, which he does. He then uses his wits to prevent the pirates from blowing up the ship along with the crew and passengers, suggesting that they hold the ship for ransom.

When a beautiful woman is discovered on board, the Pirate Lieutenant claims her. Being in love at first sight for her, the Black Pirate finds a way to temporarily save her from this fate by presenting her as a "princess" and urging the crew to use her as a hostage to ensure their ransom will be paid, as long as she remains "spotless and unharmed".

The pirates cheer the Black Pirate and want to name him captain. The Pirate Lieutenant jeers but consents to wait to see if the ransom is paid by noon the next day. However, he secretly has a confederate destroy the ransom ship later that night to ensure it will not return. Then, when the Black Pirate is caught trying to release the woman, the Pirate Lieutenant exposes him as a traitor, and the pirates force him to walk the plank.

At noon the next day, with the ransom ship having failed to show, the Pirate Lieutenant goes to the woman to claim his prize. But just then, the Black Pirate, who with the help of the sympathetic one-armed pirate MacTavish had survived being sent overboard, returns, leading troops to stop the pirates. After a long fight, the pirates are routed. In the end, the Black Pirate is revealed to be a Duke, and the "Princess" he loves is a noble Lady. Even MacTavish is moved to tears of joy by the happy ending.

Cast

thumb|right|Page from the souvenir book.

  • Douglas Fairbanks as The Duke of Arnoldo / "The Black Pirate"
  • Billie Dove as Princess Isobel
  • Anders Randolf as Pirate Captain
  • Donald Crisp as MacTavish
  • Tempe Pigott as Duenna
  • Sam De Grasse as Pirate Lieutenant
  • Charles Stevens as Powder Man
  • Charles Belcher as Chief Passenger (Nobleman)
  • E. J. Ratcliffe as The Governor
  • John Wallace as Peg-Leg Pirate
  • Fred Becker as Pirate
  • Nino Cochise as Pirate (uncredited)
  • Jimmy Dime as Pirate (uncredited)
  • George Holt as Pirate (uncredited)
  • Harold Kruger as Pirate (uncredited)
  • Charles Lewis as Pirate (uncredited)
  • Barry Norton as Youth (uncredited)
  • Mary Pickford as Princess Isobel In Final Embrace (uncredited cameo)
  • Bob Roper as Pirate (uncredited)

Production

Precedents

Listed in 1993 on the National Film Registry for its "cultural, historical or aesthetic significance", The Black Pirate is considered "one of the silent films that is best remembered" Part of that reputation is based on the plot, but above all on the fact that it was one of the first films shot with the Technicolor two-tone process, which was rare and very expensive at the time. The Black Pirate is often referred to as the first "good" color film, with a "level of quality [of colour] never before seen in a feature film." Given the limitations of the process used, it is also a "flawed but strangely beautiful artifact". According to his son, Fairbanks was "the first to make a feature film in color", despite the prohibitive cost and technical problems, spending "a whole year with laboratory experiments to find the combination that would be the most restful for the eye" and choosing a chromatic choice that "no one had ever thought of".

thumb|left|alt=Page from Tinting And Toning Of Eastman Positive Motion Picture Film|Kodak color chart for tinting and turning of films (1927).

However, the film is far from being the first to use colors. These have been present since the earliest days of cinema, not to perfect an illusion of realism, but as an ornamental and spectacular attraction. In 1926, when Fairbanks' film was released, 80 to 85% of film productions featured color effects, mainly by tinting or toning. These are arbitrary colors, added with dyes, and are supposed to connote the psychological atmosphere of the scene. On the other hand, the colors of The Black Pirate are supposed to be natural, i.e., produced by the subject's light imprint alone "in such a way that the colors are exclusively chosen and reproduced by optical and mechanical means". The opposition between natural and artificial colors dates back to the introduction in the 1910s of the first natural color process, Kinemacolor, the predecessor of Technicolor and a competitor of the Pathécolor process, which used stencil coloring. However, for technical reasons, the supposedly "natural" processes of Kinemacolor and then Technicolor are based on compression, simplifying the removal of blue, one of the three primary components of color, to retain only a "duotone" of red and green. The lack of fidelity in certain parts of the spectrum, combined with other technical problems, leads to a paradoxical situation where processes that are supposed to give colors greater veracity, or even a "sterecopic" quality, present worse results in some respects than those deemed artificial and subjective. Like its predecessor, Technicolor has a complex relationship with competing processes, sometimes opposing them in the name of the distinction between the natural and the artificial and sometimes in the name of the aesthetic quality of the result, the cinematographic color being compared to that of the painting of the "old masters".

thumb|right|Technicolor process No. 2 used in the film [[Stage Struck (1925 film)|Stage Struck (1925), produced by superimposing and pasting a green recording, dyed red, and a red recording, dyed green. The actress pictured here is Gloria Swanson.]]

Technicolor Process No. 2 used for Fairbanks’ film is a process for rendering natural colors by duotone developed in 1921 and which represented a significant improvement over Technicolor No. 1, for which the Technicolor company had been established in 1915. Process No. 1, two-tone like its successor, had the disadvantage of requiring the separate projection of the green and red recordings, the two images being superimposed on the screen, by additive synthesis, with the inevitable colored fringes as soon as the subject was in motion. On the contrary, in process number 2, called subtractive synthesis, the red and green recordings are glued back-to-back to form just one single reel, usable with the projector model available in all theaters. while exposing himself to reproach for "stained glass effects" that seem to be directly derived from magic lantern views and for poorly proportioned costume colors and backgrounds, Bernard Eisenschitz even believes that "all the critics" condemn the colors. Repeating the choices of the inventors of Kinemacolor, Technicolor's engineers prioritize skin tones and sacrifice the blue of the sea and sky, which leads to a "paradoxical coexistence of the natural and the ornamental". Professionals enthusiastically receive both films and help to create a demand for natural colors, due to the disappearance of the effects of colored fringes of previous processes and the beauty of subtractive duotone, perceived as providing "everything that can be desired", particularly the rendering of flesh tones which acquire the quality of "exquisite" paintings "endowed with life" However, it would take four years for a second film, made entirely in Technicolor, to be released, which would be Fairbanks'.

The difficulties of printing these films betray the still experimental nature of the processes. It was not until four months after the premiere of The Toll of the Sea that the film went into general release, due to Technicolor's lengthy process of developing prints. These logistical problems led Technicolor to increase the development capacity of its Boston plant, open a small laboratory in Hollywood, and then solicit producers to obtain the work needed to supply this increased production capacity. Herbert Kalmus, the president of Technicolor, proposed to Cecil B. DeMille to shoot color sequences for the film The Ten Commandments in 1923 at his own expense. Their success with the public convinced Jesse Lasky, the head of Paramount, to take the risk of signing a contract with Technicolor in November 1923 for a western with several scenes in Technicolor, Wanderer of the Wasteland, which was released in 1924 and whose "pictorial beauty" was praised by the press. The New York Herald Tribune reviewer, however, noted that it was impossible to concentrate on the story when "images far more beautiful than the works of the great masters" were parading by. Its director, Irvin Willat, pays particular attention to the film's chromatic balance, seeking to avoid overly bright red and green tones and not separating himself during the shooting of reference watercolor charts. However, several factors mitigated the film's success: Technicolor took more than a year to deliver the 280 prints ordered by Paramount, the cost of color printing was high, and the process of gluing two films back to back made the prints fragile.

Despite the interest it aroused, the Technicolor process remained little used by the film industry prior to The Black Pirate, which continues to prefer tinting and turning, and even coloring for certain special effects, and to reserve its use for particular sequences. For example, in Ben-Hur, the biblical scenes were constructed like paintings.

Beginnings

The Black Pirate project was born more than three years before it was filmed, in the context of a literary vogue on the theme of pirates in the United States, which is self-integrated in a "Peter Pan business culture" marked by the desire of young urban whites not to grow up, to do their job like a game, and to be able to attribute their social success to their eternal youthfulness. This vogue resulted in the development of a visual stereotype of the "mythical pirate", a mixture of a sixteenth-century sailor and a gypsy with a scarf on his head, an earring and a scarf at his waist, created by Howard Pyle, who trained and inspired cartoonists Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth.

From the outset, Fairbanks associated the project of a pirate film with that of a color film. Before the release of The Toll of the Sea, the actor and producer had been skeptical about the interest of this type of process, declaring that it was only a "fetish" and that adding color would be as useless as "putting lipstick on Venus de Milo". After attending the premiere of The Toll of the Sea, he contacted Kalmus and expressed interest in the process. He then linked the project of a pirate film to that of a color film on a regular basis. He declared in January 1923: "All the pirate movies I've seen are disappointing because they're in black and white. Color is the theme and flavor of piracy".

In 1923, Fairbanks stated that the film would not be shot in the shades of red and green that he believed had spoiled other productions, but in pastel shades in the style of a Maxfield Parrish painting. This would create a very different reference to what would be the chromatic tone of The Black Pirate, but which evokes the dyed prologue of The Thief of Baghdad. Maxfield Parrish, one of the most famous American illustrators of the 1920s, was above all known for the use of a "fairytale" cobalt blue — Parrish Blue — Surrounded by pastel tones, as in the illustration opposite, as well as for his joyful treatment of children's stories that earned him the nickname "Peter Pan of illustration". Fairbanks first hired him as artistic director for The Thief of Baghdad before abandoning this collaboration, as the painter's projects proved to be unfeasible. The film was nevertheless presented as imbued with the "feeling of a rich Parrish blue", a quality particularly evident in its poster, which is often erroneously attributed to this artist.

Jackie Coogan would later claim to have given Fairbanks the idea of The Black Pirate in 1922, praising Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates that he had just read, from which Douglas Fairbanks immediately drew a first draft of the screenplay, according to him. At the time, Ernst Lubitsch was considered a specialist in historical films in costume. In November 1922, after being invited to Hollywood by Fairbanks' wife, Mary Pickford, Lubitsch stated that he was going to direct Fairbanks in a "swashbuckling romance of the time of the pirates" of which the actor, for his part, said he still had only a vague idea. There was talk of entrusting the writing of the screenplay to Edward Knoblock and the female lead to Evelyn Brent. At the end of 1922, Fairbanks was obsessed with the pirate film being shown, and Mary Pickford gave him an old model of a galleon for Christmas.

In 1923, the film press reported many rumors about the imminent start of production of the pirate film. At the beginning of the year, it was stated that Lubitsch would directed it; then, that this task would be entrusted to Raoul Walsh, as Lubitsch had begun work on Rosita with Mary Pickford. A little later, it was revealed that Fairbanks had hired Dwight Franklin, a diorama designer considered a specialist in piracy; as the start of filming is neared, the working title became The Black Pirate, and was originally to be a big-budget sea film set in the Middle Ages.

alt=Color still, actress in oriental attire.|thumb|left|Technicolor test during the filming of [[The Thief of Bagdad (1924 film)|The Thief of Bagdad, whose director of photography, Arthur Edeson, conducted experiments in color.

According to Thorp, "all the free time" in the six months leading up to filming was devoted to color testing for sets, make-up, and costumes. These tests quickly showed that the same paint does not produce the same color on the film, depending on whether it is applied to two different substrates; however, two shades could match on the film even though they clashed in reality. The walls of the studios were painted with samples of all shades to appreciate the rendering of each of them, and from there build a color chart to determine which color an object should be painted or dyed, to obtain the desired result on the screen. This process was complicated by the fact that the color rendering changed depending on whether the lighting was natural or artificial. In view of this compilation of color charts, the decision was made to paint or dye all the costumes, sets and accessories to control their chromatic rendering.

For their part, Technicolor's engineers adjusted the color print to meet Fairbanks' expectations. To do this, on the initiative of Arthur Ball and despite their personal preference for more saturated colors, they used "blackened dyes" to dye the color stripes, i.e. dyes to which black had been added to "modulate" their brilliance. Kalmus notes how well the result corresponds to the desired effect: the skin tones are softer, excess red is reduced, and the prints "have an absence of grain, a softness of texture, as well as a sharpness and clarity of the faces that are highly satisfactory".

Casting

Fairbanks surrounded himself with a group of talented performers. For the role of MacTavish, he chose Donald Crisp, who had directed him in Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), and also played the film’s main villain. Sam de Grasse, who had played the role of the lecherous Prince John in Robin Hood (1922), was awarded the role of the pirate lieutenant, while Anders Randolph was given the role of the ill-fated pirate captain. Randolph had prior fencing experience, which aided in his performance. Charles Stevens, who had supported Fairbanks in many films, including The Three Musketeers (1921) and Robin Hood, was cast as the pirate whose job it is to blow up ships after his crewmates had ransacked them.

For the role of the heroine, Fairbanks originally wanted an unknown actress. However, after seeing Billie Dove in Wanderer of the Wasteland, he offered her the role. In an interview made many years later, she recalled:

Scenario

thumb|right|alt=magazine cover.|First issue of [[Johnston McCulley's serial novel The Further Adventures of Zorro in May 1922, with the cover announcement that Fairbanks would soon play the role of the hero McCulley presented various ideas, including a sequel to Zorro with pirates and a story of chivalry (which would become Robin Hood after modification). The specialized press was quick to announce that Fairbanks' next film would be a Zorro adventure with pirates, but the news was denied after a month. However, it was planned that the story, entitled The Further Adventures of Zorro, would be published as a serial release, so that the upcoming film, starring the same actors as The Mark of Zorro, can build on the expected success with the readership. Fairbanks bought the rights to the story in 1922 and reused several elements of it in the screenplay of The Black Pirate, including the character played by Donald Crisp, the capture of the heroine by the pirates, Fairbanks' acrobatics in the sails of the ship and the final intervention of his acolytes. The Black Pirate also takes up the stereotypes of the hero's secret identity and the superiority of a normative political order over its violent negation by pirates.

The film's synopsis is based, in addition to McCulley's story, on a screenplay called The Black Pirate written in 1923 for Fairbanks by Eugene Wiley Presbrey, as well as elements of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Despite these borrowings, the authorship of the film's synopsis is claimed by Fairbanks, as with most of his films, under the pen name (formed from his middle and third names) of Elton Thomas. The final version, however, was developed in collaboration with screenwriter Jack Cunningham and Lotta Woods, Fairbanks' secretary and screenwriter. "there is no script", but only a set plot and a shooting schedule where the action was summarized in less than 2,000 words and which dealt only with the essence of the action, leaving Fairbanks more room for improvisation during filming. For his part, Albert Parker believes that the concern to balance the use of color to give the viewer the feeling of the pirate world and the development of a plot led to the latter being limited to a "succession of situations", the narrative framework being reduced to a simple thread. According to Bernard Eisenschitz, the simplification of the story and the slowing down of its pace are intended to focus the viewer's attention on the colors.

The simplification of the script results in a reduced number of scenes, 750 compared to an average of 1,000 to 3,000 for a feature film, and intertitles (only 78). Jeffrey Richards, for the same reason, considers him one of the best in Fairbanks:

Set design

The artistic direction of the film was entrusted to Carl Oscar Borg, a self-taught painter and former sailor, known for his illustrations of the Southwest United States, whom Fairbanks had previously consulted for westerns and to whom he gave great creative freedom. Borg made "hundreds of sketches of the sets and characters" According to a journalist, as a "brilliant painter", he created "a whole historical novel on the web even before the first turn of the crank". While Borg designed the sets, Franklin took care of the costumes and the positioning of the actors and extras, preparing sketches each evening for the next day's filming. For his part, the English poet Robert Nichols was in charge of "orchestrating the movement", especially those of pirate groups

It was first planned to shoot on Santa Catalina Island, near Los Angeles, where other pirate film shoots have already taken place. However, it appears from the first color tests that it is too difficult to control the effect of external light is too difficult, with the chromatic rendering being "all wrong — the yellows too yellow and the greens too violent".

To control the color effects, all sets designed by Borg and his team, as well as 95% of the exteriors, were created at the Pickford-Fairbanks studio in Hollywood. containing more than two and a half million liters of water, was built, on the edges of which were placed aircraft propellers to obtain waves one meter high. The blue of the sky that could not be rendered, so it was made into an "idealized" white with touches of brown, This task was coordinated by a specialist named "Doc" Wilson. To ensure the verisimilitude of details, such as hemp swellings, he employed European craftsmen,

Stunts

National distribution began at the end of May 1926, supported by favorable reviews and the novelty effect of Technicolor. The Black Pirate was voted one of the ten best films of 1926 and one of the most popular films of 1927. By the end of 1927, the revenue from its American operations amounted to $1,730,000. A total of 416 copies were ordered from Technicolor, which took a year to deliver. However, because of the high costs, which amounted to $847,000, including $170,000 for the Technicolor print run that was three times more expensive than a black and white one, the film was one of the least profitable of those produced by Fairbanks, surpassed only in this respect by the expensive The Thief of Baghdad.

Internationally, the film's distribution capitalized on the "global star" status of Fairbanks and the success of his previous swashbuckling films. In 1926, he was one of the most popular stars in Korea, which led to record-breaking distribution rights for his films. The exclusive first rights to The Black Pirate in Seoul sparked a resounding competition between exhibitors, leading to police intervention before the rights were awarded to the Dansungsa theatre for the Korean-speaking audience and the Ogonkan theatre for the Japanese-language audience. The film was also a great success in India.

Technical problems

While specialized operators had supervised the screening of the premieres, many difficulties arise during the screening in ordinary theaters. In particular because projectionists, after screening black-and-white newsreels, refrained from changing the setting of their projectors, despite the recommendations given to them by Technicolor to avoid problems related to operating errors.

The double emulsion process not only poses problems with adjusting the sharpness of the projection but also makes the film more prone to scratches and poor workmanship, such as air bubbles between the two glued strips that create blurring. In addition, the humidity variations and the contraction caused by the heat released by the arc lamps of the projectors create curves (cupping) that prevent focus and sometimes cause the film to detach, making it unusable. It was then necessary to return these films to the Technicolor laboratory in Boston for repair, or even to prepare replacement copies and make them quickly available anywhere. Herbert Kalmus summed it up: "the film was a great success but our troubles never ended". These setbacks had the opposite effect to that expected by Technicolor, as commercial success revealed technical failure.

Technicolor did not design the two-strip glued process used to produce The Black Pirate as the best possible solution, but as a step in a gradual process leading to the superimposition of several layers of color on a single film. To achieve this, the engineers had broken down the problem into several aspects, first the production of tanned matrices, glued together at first (Technicolor Process No. 2), then the imbibition of the reliefs by dyes and their transfer by hydrotypic discharge on a neutral film coated with a layer of etched gelatin (Technicolor Process No. 3). Unlike Technicolor process 2, the two positives obtained by the separation carried out behind the lens are not intended to be colored, but hardened, to form "matrices" that allow, like the lithographic process, printing on a neutral support. The principle of this process was discovered by Technicolor engineers before 1925. Still, a disagreement with Kalmus, leading to a split within the company, delayed the development of the process, which was therefore not usable for the release of The Black Pirate. However, the desire to meet Fairbanks' demands and, above all, to satisfy him enough to obtain the market for his next film led Technicolor's managers to hasten the development of an imbibition process. Fairbanks was particularly concerned about the lack of sharpness of the color image. He considered alleviating the problem by increasing the light output of the projectors. Still, he found that, while this solution did improve the depth of field, it increased the intensity of the color more than he had intended. The problem was solved by imbibition printing and the addition of a "blackened dye", i.e. a third pass adding a black "silhouette". Kalmus emphasizes the superiority of this three-layer print: "Flesh tones have more softness, more color, and there is no more excess red tone." He also notes the "very great difference in the clarity of the facial expression … the absence of grain, the regularity of the textures and a very satisfactory appearance of contrast and clarity".

The Black Pirate was in release long enough that copies of Technicolor No. 2 coexisted with others of Technicolor No. 3. As this last process allows for better preservation of the colors, the survival of such copies today provides valuable information for assessing the original colors, as the surviving copies in Technicolor No. 2 are unusable or very degraded.

Aftermath

Fairbanks and Technicolor

In February 1927, Fairbanks planned to shoot a new film that would become The Gaucho. He wondered if the subject required color, like piracy. Eager to obtain a new contract, Herbert Kalmus and his collaborators tried to show him that the new imbibition process solved both the problems of the fragility of the copies and those of color adjustment, thanks to the printing of a black layer that allows the color tone to be modulated during the print run. Fairbanks ran more than 3,000 meters of color tests in four different tones and was ready to exploit a broader chromatic palette than that of The Black Pirate. However, in June 1927, he decided to use color only for a prologue scene and a miracle scene, Two weeks before the premiere, he changed his mind again and completely renounced color, considering that "the mix of media is basically in bad taste". and for the New York premiere, at the Liberty Theatre.

In 1929, following the advent of talkies, Fairbanks decided to shoot The Taming of the Shrew with Mary Pickford, the only film in which they starred together as the lead actors. The film was first conceived and announced as being with sound and color. At that time, however, the Technicolor process had become more sought after. The limited number of cameras available meant that only one scene at the end of the film could be considered, for which a test was conducted. Due to the scheduling difficulties created by the high demand for Technicolor on other shoots,

To address the inability to use Technicolor, Fairbanks and Pickford turned to Sonochrome, a newly marketed, pre-tinted monochrome film by Eastman Kodak, which had only just begun to market with the argument that the dye did not mask the soundtrack. Selected from eighteen available shades, Sonochrome aimed to evoke a "warm Italian atmosphere". However, it proved to be a technical and commercial failure. Joshua Yumibe, nonetheless, argues that "color consciousness" was put forward for his promotion, even though it is rooted in archaic conceptions of the moral value of colors inherited from Goethe, which would be taken over a few years later by Natalie Kalmus to promote Technicolor.

Technicolor and pirate films

The Black Pirate serves as a "hidden model" for the film The Viking (1928), directed by Roy William Neill. The latter, which evokes medieval Viking pirates, shared with Fairbanks the same screenwriter, Jack Cunningham, the same production designer, Carl Oscar Borg, the same production manager, Theodore Reed, and two of the lead actors, Donald Crisp and Anders Randolf. to prove the superiority of the imbibition process, both in terms of colors and film behavior. It was also the first full-length film in color to be accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Herbert Kalmus was closely responsible for all aspects of production and color control was overseen by his ex-wife Natalie Kalmus. Several authors believed that the film should have been nicknamed "The White Pirate" in the service of a "racialized" discourse The film met with only limited success, except communities of Scandinavian origin, which Herbert Kalmus attributes to the American public's preference for hairless faces, while long moustaches, like the one worn by Donald Crisp in the film, sometimes "fill the whole screen". which gave saturated colors to sunsets and Maureen O'Hara's red hair. This film made it possible, thanks to the three-color Technicolor, to highlight the three colors of "special significance" for the pirate film as a genre, blue, black, and red. It inaugurated a second wave of association of the Technicolor process with pirate themes, culminating with The Crimson Pirate (1952), which was more "carnivalesque" and less "flamboyant". After the latter, the genre of the color pirate film experienced a decline, due to budget constraints, changes in viewers' expectations, and monotony.

Restoration and home media

The copyright for The Black Pirate is now in the public domain. In 1999, a restored print was released on DVD by Kino Video. A blu-ray edition, also from Kino was released in 2004 and reissued by them in 2010. In 2023, a new blu-ray edition from the Cohen Media Group was released on a double-bill with Robin Hood.

The Black Pirate was given a major restoration in 2023 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. As MoMA curator Dave Kehr explains:

This restored print received its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15, 2023. It was also screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on April 10, 2024, and at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Hollywood on November 24, 2024.

Legacy

Fairbanks biographer Jeffrey Vance maintains that “The Black Pirate was the most carefully prepared and controlled work of Fairbanks’s entire career” and “the most important feature-length silent film designed entirely for color cinematography.” Vance believes the limitations imposed by early Technicolor forced him to remove the "pageantry and visual effects" of his earlier swashbuckler and produce a straightforward action adventure. "The result was a refreshing return to form and a dazzling new showcase for the actor-producer’s favorite production value: himself. Fairbanks is resplendent as the bold buccaneer and buoyed by a production brimming with rip-roaring adventure and spiced with exceptional stunts and swordplay, including the celebrated ‘sliding down the sails’ sequence, arguably the most famous set piece of the entire Fairbanks treasure chest.”

Footnotes

Bibliography

  • Primary sources
  • Secondary sources magazine

See also

  • List of early color feature films

References

  • The Black Pirate essay by Tracey Goessel from the National Film Registry
  • The Black Pirate A Silent Film Review at moviessilently.com
  • Stills at silentfilmstillarchive.com
  • United Artists Press Book on the Internet Archive
  • The Black Pirate Mary Pickford Technical Test No. 2 (color test film) at www.eastman.org
  • (Billie Dove test starts at 0:44)