A Film Canon

The Mark Of Zorro departs from previous swashbuckling films in its implication that an imperial fringe can rival, rather than simply illuminate, the centre to which it is ostensibly affixed. To this end, Mamoulian keeps the common denominators between the court of Spain and eighteenth-century Los Angeles to a bare minimum, contrasting the former's limp-wristedness, as it manifests itself in discursions on perfume, interior decoration and fashion, and the latter's quick-wristedness, as it manifests itself in displays of physical bravura, especially sword-fighting. From this perspective, Don Diego Vega (Tyrone Power) is a Spanish protagonist, and his alter-ego an American one, while his rivals, Don Luis Quintero (J. Edgar Bromberg) and Captain Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone), represent a collaboration of the two - that is, the imperial project - which is ultimately shown to be untenable. That said, the alternation between Vega and Zorro imbues Power's hands with an omniscience, or extension, comparable to that of the singers' voices in Love Me Tonight, ensuring that Rathbone's only possible defensive strategy is to train his fingers on a spinning globe of the world, and then orchestrate a duel around it. This imbues their antagonism with a curious combination of equality and inequality, as if the omniscience of God were set against the more qualified omniscience of Satan (Zorro makes his first verbal pronouncement in a monk's garb); or, alternatively, democracy itself were envisaged as a new, or nascent, kind of empire. Hence the excitement of the action sequences, which generate an unpredictability and spontaneity that supervenes their narrative determinisms.