gavin6942 Seeking revenge, an athletic young man joins the pirate band responsible for his father's death."The Black Pirate" was the third feature to be filmed in an early two-tone Technicolor process that had been first introduced in the 1922 feature "Toll of the Sea". This reproduces a limited but pleasing range of colors. "Ben-Hur", filmed around the same time, contains two-tone sequences but is shot primarily in black-and-white with tinting and toning in many scenes.This is really a defining film in the career of Douglas Fairbanks. I mean, really, it is closing in 100 years later and he is still remembered as a swashbuckler. This is the very definition of a swashbuckler film. And the color! I couldn't say much about the two-color process, but I think this looks phenomenal.

earlytalkie What a surprise when I got this DVD set! "Pirates of the Silver Screen", from Passport, contains a veritable treasure trove of pirate-themed material. "The Dancing Pirate" is a black-and-white copy of an originally Technicolor film. "The Black Pirate", which I fully expected to be presented in black-and-white, is here in it's restored Technicolor! A really good, rousing story keeps the action moving, and the stunts of the legendary Fairbanks are amazing to watch. The music score is taken from "Scheherazade" and fits the action perfectly. This was, I believe, the second full-length feature made in the two-strip Technicolor process. Absolutely see this one-of-a-kind silent classic.

secondtake The Black Pirate (1926)If Warner Bros. put out this film, it would be dark and terrifying. All the gritty awful moments, like a pirate casually sticking the sword into his victim, would be unwatchable. And it would have been in cold black and white.But this is a Douglas Fairbanks film, and in his world, which he controlled in this movie completely (his own Elton Corporation funded it), everything must be cheery. Even when the cast is made of the lowest kind of pirate. "The Black Pirate" is almost a satire right from the title, and it's shot in two-color Technicolor which gives it a rather nice, low-key tinted appearance, and of course our black pirate is not black in skin or in spirit. As his antics and smiles win over this motley crew, it has to be something like a comedy, except for its other sense of high drama and heroism.Optimism always wins, so you know at the start how it ends. What you don't know is what clever tricks, and physical feats, and twists of plot, will be called to arms to get there. Fairbanks from the 21st Century has become a kind of caricature, something the great comics avoided. Watch a Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton comedy, and the leads are never characters to laugh at, but here, in the theater I just watched this in, there was a kind of appreciative mockery in the laughter, like, "Here he goes again." And he does "go again" up the rigging and down sails and in underwater heroics. If you haven't seen a Fairbanks, movie, this is a good one to start with. It never slows down, and you really can appreciate the fun, the pure fun, that Fairbanks the actor and producer guaranteed his pre-Depression audiences.

GJValent I saw The Black Pirate during the first season(?) of Silents Please, before the Ernie Kovacs hosted episodes. Of course, it was a truncated 20 or so black and white minutes of a 90 minute color film. Still, the two scenes that stuck in my mind were the 'sword ride down the sail', and the underwater swimming sequence. I saw this episode once, and at 9 or 10 years old, didn't pay much attention to the actors. Once after that, I asked my father if that was the, 'pirate from the silent movie', while we were watching something with Gilbert Roland. My father had no idea what I was talking about. Now, sometime in the 1990s, I caught a cable documentary about silent films, (there are ****loads of docs about them), and one featured a short color sequence of The Black Pirate. OMG, I saw that 40 years ago ! Now I knew the flick, the star, the format. A quick Google and I ordered a Kino video, (pre DVD), of The Black Pirate. Everything I remembered was there, and, a LOT more. Like 70 minutes more, and, in COLOR. I don't know how big a hit this was, but, it should have been the Titanic of its day. A fast moving story, lots of action, sex(sort of), violence, revenge, and COLOR ! Also, you only had to sit still for 90 minutes instead of 4 hours. Anyway, Doug shows again why he was the King of Hollywood. Great stunts, good looking, able to do ANYTHING. BTW, the additional features on the video/DVD show you how he was able to do anything. If you haven't seen it, this 'footnote' to the history of 'silent, color film', is a must see/have.