A Modern Musketeer (Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, Artcraft Pictures, 1917)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 14) Turner Classic Movies showed on its “Silent Sunday Nights” feature a film I’d long been curious about: A Modern Musketeer, made in 1917 by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. after he’d only been in Hollywood for two years. In that time he’d acquired such a following that when he told Adolph Zukor at Paramount that he wanted to film E. P. Lyle’s short story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” and he wanted to shoot the second half of it on location at the Grand Canyon, he got the green light without any apparent difficulty. Made by the Douglas Fairbanks Picture Company and released through Paramount’s higher-end label, Artcraft Pictures (which would also release the films of Fairbanks’s wife-to-be, Mary Pickford), A Modern Musketeer was directed by Allan Dwan (the fifth of his 11 films with Fairbanks) and also written and edited by him. The film actually starts with an elaborate prologue showing Fairbanks playing D’Artagnan, and it’s clear that playing this sequence gave Fairbanks the idea to make a full-fledged adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s The Three Musketeers, which he would do four years later and definitively transition his career from modern-dressed romantic comedies to costumed period pieces. Once the dry run is out of the way, Fairbanks’s modern-day character is revealed as Ned Thacker, a young man from Kansas who’s obsessed with D’Artagnan and the whole mythos of The Three Musketeers. A later flashback sequence explains why: Ned’s mother (Edythe Chapman) was reading the novel incessantly while she was pregnant with him, and we’re supposed to assume that her obsession with Dumas penetrated the womb and got transmitted to her as-yet unborn baby. When Ned grows up he lasts six months at college (an intertitle tells us “he finished four years of college in six months … by request”) and gets into a lot of trouble, as when he pulls on an older man on a trolley and demands he give up his seat for two women. The man turns out to be the town police chief and Ned ends up serving a brief sentence in jail. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dodge (Kathleen Kirkham) is deeply in debt and decides she can get out of it by essentially selling her daughter Elsie (Marjorie Daw) to Forrest Vandeteer (Eugene Ormonde), “the richest man in Yonkers.” Forrest suggests that Elsie and her mother take a road trip in Forrest’s chauffeur-driven car, while Thacker’s father sends him out of town by giving him a car (a Model T Ford, of course!) the way D’Artagnan’s father gave him a horse. The two cars meet in Arizona, where Forrest’s car stalls out at the edge of a precipice and Ned is quite taken with the chauffeur because he’s from France, the country of which Ned dreams.

Of course Ned is also quite taken with Elsie Dodge, but he’s got at least two rivals for her. One is Forrest Vandeteer and the other is Chin-de-dah (Frank Campeau), a Native chief who lives in one of the stone dwellings built into the side of the Grand Canyon and offers refuge to various outlaws and crooks. Among the residents of his compound are James Brown (Tully Marshall) and an unidentified bandit (Jim Mason). Surprisingly, especially since Tully Marshall (best known for his creepy villain roles in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly) is playing him, James Brown turns out to be a sympathetic character, a man who was swindled out of a fortune and who became an outlaw only when his family accused him of being the swindler. Another surprise is that midway through the film, Mrs. Dodge has an attack of conscience and realizes that she shouldn’t essentially sell her daughter to the rich guy but should let her pair up with Ned instead. Of course Chin-de-dah wants to kidnap Elsie and turn her into his sex slave – and we get a flashback sequence that shows what happened to the last woman he kidnapped for that purpose: she got a knife and used it to commit suicide. It’s obvious what’s going to happen: Ned is going to rescue Elsie from Chin-de-dah and also gallantly save the life of Forrest, who ends up dangling over a gorge on a rope that Ned pulls up to rescue him. Thereby Ned will fulfill his lifelong ambition of being a real-life D’Artagnan. I liked the first half of A Modern Musketeer a lot better than the second. Fairbanks designed his films largely to show off his athletic skills, including elaborate “trajectory” gags that reminded me of Buster Keaton. (Later I recalled that Keaton’s first feature, The Saphead, had been based on a play Fairbanks had performed on the Broadway stage before entering films. So the similarities between them are not accidental.) The second half is considerably less interesting, despite the stunning Grand Canyon scenery which must have wowed movie audiences in 1917. One of my problems with the film is the frankly racist depiction of Native Americans, particularly the whole idea that the chief is willing to kidnap and enslave a white woman simply because he's bored with the Native women available to him more or less consensually. The action scenes are also surprisingly dull, especially by comparison with what Fairbanks and Dwan would achieve just five years later in their joint masterpiece, Robin Hood (1922). They’re shot with the camera miles away and little suspense editing. A Modern Musketeer is an O.K. film that obviously delivered the goods for its 1917 audiences, and it’s a welcome preservation today (the existing print was restored by the Danish Film Archive, which preserved a surprising number of silent films that would have otherwise been lost, and outfitted with a score in 2006 by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra that was O.K.; I’m surprised they didn’t use Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite for some of the underscoring, but I believe that would still have been under copyright protection in 2006) but an acceptable entertainment rather than a truly great film.