“Fairbanks was to work with other directors and writers, but Loos and Emerson were his favorite collaborators for the next two years. All their films were made from the same formula: an Eastern effete or a European playboy or a poor little rich boy proves his manhood through some kind of crazy, romantic adventure. Or, as a variation, the Fairbanks hero was a frustrated dreamer, caught in some humdrum job and longing for romance and excitement. Years later Doug said that in these early comedies he had tried ‘to catch the real spirit of youth…the spirit that takes short cuts and dashes impetuously at what it wants, that doesn’t take time to walk around obstacles, but hurdles them – the fine, restless and impatient, conquering spirit of youth that scales whatever hazards are in its way’. Though a bit overstated (Doug seems to be parroting his own notices), this description is apt enough. The hundreds of thousands of young American men trapped in monotonous nine-to-five jobs did look on Doug’s adventures (in Alistair Cook’s words) ‘as an antidote, a goal for the fretting city worker to aim at…a source of constant inspiration’. Nonetheless, it seems pretty certain that Doug didn’t set out to capture the spirit of youth – that was an afterthought. The screen character Anita Loos devised for him was designed to minimize his deficiencies as an actor and to give him every opportunity to display his abilities as a gymnast. In His Picture in Papers, he went several rounds with a professional boxer, dove from the deck of an ocean liner and took a breath-taking (and very dangerous) leap from a speeding train”.

(G. Carey, Doug & Mary, E. P. Dutton, New York 1977)

“Douglas Fairbanks is a contemporary of the great American comedians. The plot of his first feature film, The Lamb, from 1915, was taken from a play by Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes, The New Henrietta. In 1920 Herbert Blaché directed Buster Keaton in The Saphead, based on the same play. Both actors play the role – slightly different from their usual ones – of the naive but winning simpleton. In 1919 Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith founded United Artists Corporation. There are photographs of that period where it is rather difficult to tell who is Chaplin and who is Fairbanks, as they are so similar in height and features. 1923 saw the release of the most famous feature by Harold Lloyd, Safety Last, in 1922 a specialist in action movies, Allan Dwan directed Robin Hood with Douglas Fairbanks and in 1924 Raoul Walsh, the master of adventure movies, directed Fairbanks in The Thief of Baghdad. The protagonists of these films perform daredevil feats. Lloyd and Fairbanks perform in acrobatic scenes and both seem to have already fully assimilated the American ‘keep smiling’ tenet in their comic mask, thus baring their teeth even when danger is extreme. What Allan Dwan said about Fairbanks could be true also for Lloyd: ‘Stuntmen were supposed to imitate him, but what they did seemed always an acrobatic trick, while when he was in action everything seemed so real’”.

(Thomas Brandlmeier, Laugh and the World will Laugh with You, Cinegrafie, n. 12, 1998)