A L S O++T O D A Y

Zorro vs. Tarzana
By Stephen Talbot
How the masked avenger taught a white kid from the suburbs about California's past

THE FACE OF ZORRO | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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McCulley's first imaginative slash was the time frame. He carefully set his plot somewhere near the end of Spanish rule, when California was a distant frontier still controlled by corrupt, dictatorial Castille. His second slash was to join the rancho period and the mission period, which enjoyed their heydays many years apart, into an amalgam of both. And his third and final slash was to create a fictional character: a heroic, freedom-fighting Californio called Zorro, who is really the son of a Spanish don and thus part of the land-granted rancho-owning aristocracy of noble European blue bloods. It would only take Hollywood to throw in some flashy swordplay and an appealing hot-blooded señorita or two, and an irresistible franchise was born.

Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was there to godfather. As the first top movie actor to recognize the cinematic potential in Zorro, he purchased the screen rights in 1920. His feature film, "The Mark of Zorro," not only launched his overwhelming success as a swashbuckling screen star in a series of adventures, it also created the classic Anglo Latin Lover mold from which all subsequent masked avengers would be cast. Fairbanks' silent action flick, cinematizing McCulley's story with clever verve and humor, set the style and plot for most of the screenplays to follow.

The basic plot is a 19th century American morality play in which the hero saves a family from ruination and thereby wins the daughter. Young, aristocratic Don Diego, having completed his studies in Madrid, returns to find tyranny running rampant in California. As El Zorro, he begins to wage a one-man war against villainous captains and corrupt governors. In order to divert suspicion from himself, Diego takes on the air of a foppish dandy, deceiving everyone, including his father, the old noble Don, and his lady love, Lolita. With minor variations, this has been the basic story of the continuing saga for 80 years.

Yet the question remains: What is the secret of his enduring appeal across generations? Could it be that underneath all the masks, in the dark recesses of fictional denial, lurks the twisted visage of Manifest Destiny? Zorro is, after all, the shining star of a mythical California, set in a time and place that never existed. It is a California under insufferable Spanish rule, before 1820 and the advent of Mexico's short-lived (and equally undesirable) republican hegemony, and certainly long before the arrival of the Americans. In real historical time, the Spanish colonial period lasted hardly more than 50 years (1769-1821), followed by the Mexican Republic period (1821-1848), which in turn barely lasted a quarter of a century, before the Mexican-American War ceded fully half the national territory of Mexico, including newly discovered gold in California, to the United States.

This crucial historical juncture, a cultural schism for Mexican-Americans, is what underlies the Zorro myth and makes for much Chicano discomfort with its hypocrisy. The fictitious Zorro cannot comfortably survive beyond an 1848-50 story time line without provoking embarrassing questions. By the time California is part of the United States, his foppish usefulness as a critic and foe of corrupt Mexican and Spanish ways is irrevocably gone. There is no place for a Hispanic masked avenger in the new American context. In 1940, 20th Century Fox released a remake of "The Mark of Zorro" starring Tyrone Power and directed by Rouben Mamoulian (also starring Basil Rathbone as the villainous Captain Esteban and Linda Darnell as his lady love) that shifted the time frame into the Mexican period. Yet in this version, Zorro's Mexican antagonists are as corrupt and pernicious in their lazy incompetence as their Spanish predecessors. Perhaps even more so. After all, since the mid-18th century, Mexico has been a more serious threat than Spain all along its 2,000-mile border with Anglo America.

As one of Hollywood's first Castillian caballeros, Zorro often matched his impeccable pedigree against lesser members of his race in the settling of Spanish California. When he wasn't opposing the mestizo mobocracy of the half-breed Cholos, he was defending the upper-class landed gentry of pure-blooded noble hacendados. He was both simpering dandy, thus satirizing the comic incompetence of his pretentious class, and secret freedom fighter for the wealthy white Californios (almost always portrayed by non-Spanish-speaking Anglo actors). In later versions, the black-clad masked wonder with flowing cape and flashing blade single-handedly defeated the Mexican canaille. Waiting in the wings, of course, were the Americans -- who, as diligent, honest and industrious Protestants, represented the very antithesis of lazy, immoral and untrustworthy Spanish or Mexican Catholics.

In 1925, Fairbanks was so loath to let the Masked Avenger go that he filmed the successful sequel "Don Q., Son of Zorro." In 1936, with the advent of sound, Republic pictures resurrected the Fox as "The Bold Caballero," then launched him again in 1937 in a series of five 12-part serials called "Zorro Rides Again." His appeal was not lost on the larger studios, but throughout the '40s, due to increasingly cheaper remakes capitalizing only on the marquee appeal of his name, Zorro barely remained box office.

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