Hollywood has long had a love-hate relationship with the spectacle, pageantry and potential boondoggle that pirate movies represent. It’s an attraction and sometimes repulsion that fits perfectly with the anti-heroic romance of the pirate characters, right down to the fortunes that can be plundered and lost over the course of an adventure.
This dynamic goes back almost to commercial cinema, and one of the most notable films of this action-adventure subgenre has just turned 100 years old. Even a century later, it will be released on March 8, 2026. The black pirate remains an enduring example of why it takes more than one cutthroat islandBomb-sized bombshell or Pirates of the Caribbean-style diminishing returns from a later period to discourage studios from returning to the high seas.
No offense to those Pirates of the Caribbean movies, particularly the flashy, Terry Gilliam-influenced Gore Verbinski ones, but The black pirate it keeps its story gratifyingly simple. After a vicious pirate attack on a ship, an initially nameless survivor (original Zorro actor Douglas Fairbanks) arrives on an island and swears revenge for his father’s murder. When some of the same pirates appear on the island, the survivor transforms into The Black Pirate to kill his captain, infiltrate his crew, and undermine his reign of terror from within. His efforts to achieve this involve displaying his athletic prowess as a buccaneer while saving lives, such as that of a princess (Billie Dove) he finds on a ship attacked by pirates.
The fake pirate who is also amazing at hacking is an irresistible narrative hook, perhaps because it depends on creating the wish-fulfillment subtext of pirate stories; Sure, they do some bad things, but wouldn’t it be tremendous fun to try it out before devoting yourself to the “right” side? – in the action on screen. The film is mostly about allowing the athletic Fairbanks to play pirate while still reading like an exemplary hero. That sense of confusion between the boy’s adventure and the man’s physical ability would permeate adventure films for, well, much of the next 100 years.
Part of the reason why The black pirateThe simplicity is that it is a silent film, produced about a year earlier. The jazz singer set Hollywood on the path to full-sound talkies as the new standard. Because The black pirate has no spoken dialogue, just a swashbuckling score, some modern audiences might be confused to realize it’s also a color film. It’s easy to think that talkies largely predate color films, because black-and-white photography remained dominant for several decades after silent films virtually disappeared. But experiments with color date back to the earliest days of cinema; They just weren’t always particularly viable.
The black pirate It was actually produced specifically to function as a color pirate film. In 1923, the Indianapolis Star quoted Fairbanks as saying that he found black-and-white pirate films disappointing because “color is the theme and flavor of privacy.” This was three years before the release of The black piratewhich reflects the long gestation of the film. Although Fairbanks wanted to introduce color into a pirate film, he also shared the prevailing idea about the early use of color in films, namely that it was potentially a major distraction from what was really happening on screen.
The film ended up using Technicolor’s two-strip process, a handy complicated technique that boils down to “you can have some red and some green,” to create more subdued tones than previous uses of film colorization, which tended to be saturated-looking tints. The black pirate takes a surprisingly light touch with its color images, and the effect can vary: in certain shots, it looks surprisingly naturalistic for its time, while in others it looks more like a painting or a modern comic that intentionally limits its color palette (as Superman: red and blue). It seems to strike the right balance between offering a colorful portrait of pirate adventures without breaking the reality of its spectacular staging.
And despite that striking use of color, it’s Fairbanks combined with the abundant pirate masses that makes The black pirate so dazzling. There are several shots that appear to contain many more people than make up the entire cast of, say, the recent pirate resurgence. The bluff (as fun as it is), including a moment where a seemingly endless supply of soldiers lend a hand to progressively lift the Black Pirate across a ship like an elevator of human hands.
Fairbanks also makes some impressive vertical moves of his own. The film features multiple instances of (and is generally assumed to have created) the classic pirate move in which you stick a knife into a sail and drive it up to the deck. The reason this is almost certainly coming from this movie and not real life is that doing this probably wouldn’t work; The fascinatingly complicated illusion involved some combination of a tilted sail (and a correspondingly tilted camera), pre-torn fabric, and hidden cables and counterweights.
It’s that level of effort that makes The black pirate so visible 100 years later – it doesn’t exactly look “real”, with its particular color palette, fast-paced action and ships that rarely seem to be in genuine seascapes. But the illusion work is not only effective in the moment (it really does look like Fairbanks is sliding down the sail of a ship using a knife) but is spectacular in itself. A big pirate-versus-soldier hand-to-hand combat doesn’t need to include a shot of dozens of strangely equipped soldiers swimming in sync toward the ship, but it has the majesty of a lavish musical in the middle of an action-adventure movie. Perhaps that is why Hollywood continues to defy the difficulties of filming on water, dressing up dozens of extras and risking its doubloons: The black pirate proves that pirates are perfect subjects for pure cinema.
Being a public domain film, The black pirate it’s streaming for free on the internet, from Tubi to Amazon to the Roku Channel to a decent copy found back in the day. YouTube.
Soruce: polygon.com