The Mark of Zorro (1920)

This is my first silent action film, a swashbuckler based on a minor novel from the previous year that owes perhaps just a little to Baroness Orczy, that romantic and reactionary Hungarian aristocrat, Here the noble heroes are Spanish, in a Los Angeles and a southern California that still owed allegiance to the Spanish throne yet feels somewhat like a proto-Western, but at least their noble blood, while being much-fetishised, is focused on saving the poor, downtrodden and even the "natives" from arbitrary tyranny.

At first it seemed odd watching a straightforward romantic swashbuckler without sound, with early scenes relying heavily on intertitles, but it works, mainly because of the winning combination of the splendidly shot visual spectacle of the action scenes and the winning charisma of the merry Douglas Fairbanks Jr as the eponymous hero, played pretty much as a traditional Robin Hood- and it also helps that the pulp style plot is so straightforward, and the genre tropes so faithfully followed. This is Robin Hood crossed with the Three Musketeers set in a Los Angeles that was still part of New Spain before the Napoleonic Wars set Spain's colonies in the Americas on the path to independence- a reminder that the City of the Angels is not so young as often assumed.

I enjoyed this much more than expected. Beware, though; there are some very poor copies out there on YouTube.