The Mark Of Zorro
1920 · 107 min · western, silent
The Mark of Zorro (1920): Douglas Fairbanks puts on a mask and invents the swashbuckler genre. Watch the full silent movie free online, no account needed.
Fairbanks had spent a decade playing cheerful modern young men in good suits. Then he put on a mask, and the whole rest of his career followed from it, along with most of the costume adventure genre. Fred Niblo directed, with Marguerite De La Motte and Noah Beery.
The source was a pulp serial from the year before, Johnston McCulley's The Curse of Capistrano. Fairbanks produced it himself and put it out through United Artists, the company he had founded with Chaplin, Pickford and Griffith so that actors could stop asking studios for permission.
Every masked hero since has a little of this in the bloodstream, Batman very much included.
Free to watch via internet-archive, wikimedia, tubi, pluto.
More like this: Free westerns, Free silent films.