The Iron Mask (Elton Corporation, United Artists, 1929)

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

After Young Frankenstein my husband Charles and I kept the TV on Turner Classic Movies for the “Silent Sunday Nights” showing of Douglas Fairbanks’s last silent film, The Iron Mask (1929). It was a sequel to his 1921 film The Three Musketeers based on the two sequelae Alexandre Dumas père, creator of The Three Musketeers, had written after the original was a huge commercial success. Because Fairbanks (who not only starred in the film but also produced and, under the pseudonym “Elton Thomas,” wrote it; his birth name was Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman and he got “Fairbanks” from his mother’s first husband’s name) and director Allan Dwan (who had directed Fairbanks in his first encounter with the Dumas mythos in the 1917 film A Modern Musketeer, in which Fairbanks played a modern-day Kansas hayseed who dreams of being D’Artagnan, though Fairbanks used a different director, Fred Niblo, for his actual film of The Three Musketeers) didn’t want to see it written off as just “the last of the big silents,” they filmed two talking scenes, one at the beginning of the film and one midway through at the intermission point, in which Fairbanks as D’Artagnan faced the camera directly and spoke bits of drivel about the wonders of the age of the Three Musketeers and their “All for One, and One for All” loyalty to each other. (The original 1929 release even included a song of that title, composed by Hugo Reisenfeld and Louis Alter with lyrics by Jo Trent.) When The Iron Mask was first reissued in 1952 in a cut-down print by Allied Artists nèe Monogram, the picture survived but the original Vitaphone sound discs were lost. With Fairbanks, Sr. having been dead for 12 years by then, they hired Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to dub the prologue sequence. The Iron Mask has been through several reissues since, including the one TCM showed last night, a 2017 recycling from the Cohen Media Group (who earned my undying disgust by deleting a title card from their release of the stunning 1932 James Whale horror/comedy masterpiece The Old Dark House). It had a newly composed and recorded score from Carl Davis that included two brief but unmistakable quotes from Wagner (particularly Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung), as well as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s original voice from the soundtrack records, which were rediscovered and ended up in the Library of Congress. Frankly, I would rather have seen the film with the original 1929 soundtrack (the cuts from 1929 to 2017 sound and back were predictably jarring), if only for the sake of authenticity.

I’d seen The Iron Mask once before in one of the earlier reissue prints in which Fairbanks, Jr. dubbed Fairbanks, Sr.’s lines, but I had few memories of it. It’s really not that good a movie – nowhere near as much fun, or as inspiring dramatically, as the 1922 Fairbanks/Dwan Robin Hood – though it’s handsomely produced and the sets (the credited art directors were Carl Oscar Borg, Wilfred Buckland, Paul Burns, Ben Carré, David S. Hall, Jack Holden, Laurence Irving, Edward M. Langley, and Harold Miles!) are appropriately stunning. Though Fairbanks was 45 when he made this film, he was still a good enough acrobat to give us plenty of “trajectory” gags, including stunning leaps from balconies. The one thing that was surprising about this movie was the death toll; writer Fairbanks concocted a script in which as many of the “good” characters as the evil ones don’t make it alive to the end (or “The Beginning,” as the final title proclaims over a shot of the Four Musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan, reunited in heaven). D’Artagnan begins the movie as the captain of the guards for King Louis XIII (Rolfe Sedan), whose wife (Belle Bennett, four years after her personal triumph in the 1925 silent version of Stella Dallas) is about to give birth. Cardinal Richelieu (the superb silent-era villain Nigel de Brulier) calls on the populace of France to pray that the child is a boy so he can inherit the throne, and when the child is born and it’s a boy, Richelieu heaves a sigh of relief. Alas, Belle Bennett’s character’s body has another baby inside, and when it too turns out to be a boy Richelieu is determined to make sure no one knows about it because he reasons two equally qualified heirs could result in a revolution. As the plot develops the real villain of the piece is not Richelieu but his disloyal assistant, De Rochefort (Ulricht Haupt, villain of the 1928 John Barrymore film Tempest secretly written by Erich von Stroheim). Richelieu and Rochefort are determined to keep the secret no matter how many people they have to kill to do so, so they have the inconvenient second heir spirited off to Spain and send the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Constance (who’s also D’Artagnan’s girlfriend), to a convent. Milady de Winter (Dorothy Revier) sneaks into the convent and worms the secret out of Constance, and Rochefort’s hit squad murders Constance with three-fifths of the movie left to go just to shut her up.

Then Rochefort and the younger prince (both he and the rightful King Louis XIV, who ascends to the throne once his dad dies, are played as boys by Gordon Thorpe and as adults by William Bakewell; the Bakewell films I’ve seen previously didn’t impress me but he’s quite good here at differentiating between the good King Louis and the evil prince) hatch a plot to kidnap and imprison the real King and substitute the other heir, so between them the replacement King and Rochefort can rule France for their personal profit. (It sounds like what’s happening to the U.S. now under the restored President Trump.) The real King is locked in a fortress prison with his head encased in an iron mask so no one can see what he looks like, but he gets word to D’Artagnan by inscribing one of the metal plates on which he’s served his food with an emblem, a French coin which he cut in half, gave one half to D’Artagnan and wore the other himself as a sign of recognition. The plate is recovered by a fisherman working the river outside the castle, who reads the inscription (one imdb.com “Trivia” poster marked that as a goof because, they argued, no French peasants then could read) and brings it to D’Artagnan. The film ends with a pitched battle in which the rightful King is restored to the throne but D’Artagnan is stabbed in the back and gets to reunite with his fellow Three Musketeers in heaven. The Iron Mask is an O.K. movie but I’ve seen better action silents (including my all-time favorite action film, John Ford’s 1926 Western Three Bad Men). Fairbanks was getting visibly tired of stardom and the burdens it entailed on his life; in the next few years, as his first sound film (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew co-starring him and his real-life wife, Mary Pickford) flopped, he got more interested in extensive travels, and when Pickford divorced him she claimed that the reason for the breakup was he kept wanting to go on extended vacations and she wasn’t interested. Fairbanks even worked up a 1932 project called Mr. Robinson Crusoe that he could film on his travels by making them the main issue of the plot, though as I recall his actual last film, a 1934 historical adventure called The Private Life of Don Juan, made in England and produced and directed by Alexander Korda, was actually quite good and a worthy finish to his career. Charles made the odd comment that The Iron Mask reminded him of the 1939 spoof of The Three Musketeers starring Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers, and I pointed out that Allan Dwan had directed the Ritz Brothers’ version as well!