“The hero, a kind of Californian Scarlet Pimpernel, appears at first as an effete young dandy, daintily dabbing his nose with his handkerchief and doing party tricks. Rather like one of the heroes of the early films, he ultimately reveals his secret other self, the avenger of the poor and oppressed. The character of the avenger recurs through almost all the subsequent films, whether in the guise of d’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Don Q., the Gaucho or the Black Pirate. Adapted from a novel by Johnston McCulley, The Curse of Capistrano, the setting of Zorro was unusual – 19th-century Spanish California. It was nevertheless a world which still lingered when the Fairbanks family arrived in Hollywood in 1915, to find an old Spanish aristocracy still shunning the vagabonds of the movies. In many respects this is one of the most attractive of all the films, with Fairbanks at once at his most manic and his most graceful, and with scenes of high slapstick comedy as he teases villainous Noah Beery with a defy duelling sword that can at any moment serve him as a javelin or throwing knife”.

(David Robinson, The Hero, Cinegrafie, n. 12, 1998)