A seemingly idiotic fop is really the courageous vigilante Zorro, who seeks to protect the oppressed.

The Mark of Zorro is a 1920 silent adventure romance film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Noah Beery Sr.. This genre-defining swashbuckler adventurewas the first movie version of The Mark of Zorro. Based on the 1919 story “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley, which introduced the masked hero, Zorro, the screenplay was adapted by Fairbanks (as “Elton Thomas”) and Eugene Miller.

The film was produced by Fairbanks for his own production company, Douglas Fairbanks Pictures Corporation, and was the first film released through United Artists, the company formed by Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith.

Noah Beery, Jr. makes his first of many dozens of screen appearance spanning six decades. He portrayed a young child; his father began sporadically billing himself as Noah Beery, Sr. as a result.

The film has been remade twice, once in 1940 (starring Tyrone Power) and again in 1974 (starring Frank Langella). In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.