Spanish dueling champion Don Diego Vega (Frank Langella) returns to California to find that his father has been forced out as governor, replaced by the corrupt Luis Quintero (Robert Middleton) who has the peasants whipped, over-taxed, and generally abused. Realizing that he can help best in secret, he acts bored and effeminate in public, behaving like a hero of the people only when masked and using the name Zorro. All he has to do is force Quintero out of office, kill his muscle, Captain Esteban (Ricardo Montalban), and, since it is a Swashbuckler, win the heart of the beautiful Teresa (Anne Archer).
How did I miss this TV movie in 1974? There were far fewer channels then and I devoured anything with the slightest touch of Swashbuckling about it. But I did miss it and that’s just as well. It isn’t excruciating, if viewed in a vacuumed, but hardly something that would have fanned a boys love of a genre into a life-long obsession (I should note I like being obsessed). Of course, it can’t be seen in a vacuum. It is a remake of the 1940 Tyrone Power classic The Mark of Zorro, and that vastly superior version hovers over every mediocre frame.
While not falling into the pit of shot-for-shot remakes like The Prisoner of Zenda and Psycho, The Mark of Zorro ’74 doesn’t dance far a-field. It reuses Alfred Newman’s brassy score (a good choice) as well as the script from the 1940 movie with only a few added heroic speeches. While little is added, much has been cut. This version is sixteen minutes shorter, and that’s sixteen minutes of necessary story; the original had no fat. Several plot twists are gone, as is much of the character development (we hardly know Inez, Luis Quintero’s vain and greedy wife, and miss entirely Teresa falling in love with Zorro). But the film is different in more than just being briefer. Naturally it is in color—bright and pronounced, unfortunately used with drab, TV cinematography. The real difference, however, is in tone. 1940’s The Mark of Zorro was the most humorous classic Swashbuckler, but this version is devoid of laughs. It takes itself seriously, as if a man putting on a black mask and running around the countryside righting wrongs (and never being identified) is the most realistic thing in the world. As the fop, Langella plays it with restraint while he’s in deadly earnest as Zorro. Swashbuckling heroes are charming rogues, but this Zorro is closer to Dirty Harry. “Do you feel lucky Captain Esteban? Well do’ya?”
Everyone else joins in on the sincerity. Don Diego’s father was all bluster in 1940 and both the friar and Don Luis Quintero were comic relief. Here they are either determined politicians or straight-laced businessmen (this Luis Quintero could be dropped in the middle of a 1990s corporate corruption film).
Could this darker tone have worked? Perhaps, but only in the hands of geniuses. The heart of Zorro is the humor. The whole concept is silly, but the story knows it, and gets you laughing with it before you can laugh at it. Without that, you’re just left with a silly story.
Tone isn’t the only problem. The swordfights are few and far from impressive. The same is true of the chases. Worse, the romance is gone. Anne Archer is far too old for the role of an under-aged girl dreaming of what life could be like. When she pronounces that she’s “a woman, fully grown,” it isn’t as a girl who hopes that it is true, but as a woman who’s known it for ten years. (They’ve smartly cut the line about her upcoming eighteenth birthday.) She has little screen time with Don Diego (and even less without him) so any “courting” must have happened while the camera was somewhere else.
At least Ricardo Montalban understood the type of movie he was in. He’s sinister and larger-than-life, with a sparkle in his eye as the deranged ex-fencing instructor. But the poor man is competing with the memory of Basil Rathbone in that role, and he just can’t win.
It is fascinating to watch this and the 1940 version back-to-back. It proves that there is much more to a classic than the script. Skip this, and go for the classic.
Other Foster on Film Zorro reviews: The Mark of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro.