The Iron Mask
1929 · adventure · romance
The Iron Mask (1929): Douglas Fairbanks as D'Artagnan one last time, saying goodbye to silent film. Watch the swashbuckler free online, no account needed.
A stand-alone sequel to Fairbanks's 1921 Three Musketeers, with Allan Dwan directing again and Dumas supplying the prisoner in the mask. Fairbanks was in his mid forties here and moving a step slower, and the film knows it. There is an elegy running underneath the sword work.
Sound arrived while they were shooting, so it went out as a part-talkie: a Hugo Riesenfeld score, effects, and three spoken sequences, one of them a prologue Fairbanks delivers himself, in costume, to an audience he could tell he was losing.
Dwan later called it the last of the big silents. He was close enough to right.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
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