More Douglas Fairbanks: American Aristocracy

I promised to update my thumbnail reviews of Douglas Fairbanks films after I got hold of the last two movies. Well, American Aristocracy showed up in the mail just in time for my birthday and I have added my review.

In case you don't feel like scrolling back down the page for the original post, this is what I said:

American Aristocracy
Written by Anita Loos, who along with Frances Marion was then in the process of turning title writing into an art form, the tenth Douglas Fairbanks movie of 1916 begins as a satire of what passes for an aristocracy in a nation of over-glorified shopkeepers, with a seaside gathering of bean barons and milk kings dedicated to the proposition that wherever you go, there you'll find someone you can feel superior to—and thus, the wives of distillers can snub the wives of brewers as "social climbers."

"We ain't got any time for upstarts!"

Into this mix arrives Cassius Lee (Fairbanks), an amateur entomologist hot on the trail of the migratory caterpillar. Lee winds up involved with the heiress to the Hicks' Hatpin fortune (played by Jewel Carmen at the peak of her short-lived career) as well as gunrunners smuggling weapons to Mexico during that country's civil war (presumably to be used against the American forces who had intervened in the conflict). But, of course, this is all just an excuse to show off Fairbanks's athletic prowess and we don't get cheated as he scales buildings, springs into moving cars and swings from telephone wires.

Gotta love a man able to leap both porters and park benches in a single bound.

★★★