“This is in. It has Doug,” trumpeted Film Daily in March 1926, “its pirates are as terrible as anyone ever pictured and it is the finest specimen of the all-color feature yet produced.” Which is pretty much all you needed to know to get you to the box office to see The Black Pirate: a star (the super- athletic Douglas Fairbanks), a spectacle (full-size pirate ships), action (sword fights and dazzling stunts), romance, and, of course, color!
Filmmakers knew from the very early days the powerful effect that childhood literature and illustration, particularly if it was in color, had on audiences. It’s no coincidence that in 1903 Cecil Hepworth in England offered his Alice in Wonderland in tints and tones, or that in France, Méliès, Pathé, and Gaumont began to specialize in beautiful jewel-like stencil-color renderings of fantasy tales. The first pirate stories on film began to emerge at the end of that decade. Pirate stories were ubiquitous, based on popular sources from Walter Scott’s The Pirate and James Fennimore Cooper’s The Red Rover to spoofs such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance and more child-friendly works like Treasure Island and Peter Pan. Cheaper novels and magazines spread the swashbuckling adventure tales of Emilio Salgari and of the king of the pirate novel, Rafael Sabatini. Then, in 1924, MGM’s Ben Hur and First National’s The Sea Hawk were released, demonstrating the attractions of dramatic sea battles on full-size ships. The time seemed ripe for a full Technicolor pirate story. And who would make a more dashing hero than Douglas Fairbanks?
Also around that time, the gorgeously illustrated Book of Pirates (1921) by Howard Pyle, founder of the Brandywine School of painting, was posthumously published and a young Jackie Coogan apparently introduced Douglas Fairbanks to it. It certainly appears to have had an influence on the design of The Black Pirate and its famously subtle color palette.
The Black Pirate, of all Fairbanks’s films, demonstrated his ambition for the cinema. As Jeffrey Vance has written in his 2008 biography of Fairbanks, he was instrumental in pushing the boundaries of cinema and what we now call the Hollywood blockbuster. The complexity of making a full feature in two-strip Technicolor was prodigious, requiring real creativity from a whole raft of experts in the handling of sets, costumes, and locations—but what a triumph! The story is perhaps a little simple but the stunts have become iconic: the ascent, as Doug is handed up the side of a galleon by his shipmates, the swinging around on ropes in the rigging—now de rigueur in every pirate film—and the famous descent, slicing down the sail with a knife, which is now one of a handful of shots representing the glory days of Hollywood’s silent era. Along with this are the performances, of Doug himself, still pretty bouncy at forty-three, a villainous Sam De Grasse, and Donald Crisp, upstaging everyone as the light relief in the form of a comedy Scottish pirate.
It is ironic perhaps that the bloodthirsty genre of 18th century piracy should be the focus of so many children’s stories and “family” films, and The Black Pirate is good and gory. One of the great joys for me of seeing this Technicolor restoration was the vividness of the red on the bloody blade of the pirate who has been asked by his captain to “retrieve” a gold ring, unwisely swallowed by a captured nobleman. Gore is a feature notably lacking in most silent films. In Britain, the censorship guidelines could result in cuts for the “exhibition of profuse bleeding,” but there is no evidence The Black Pirate was seen as problematic. Iris Barry, a London-based film critic, cofounder of the super-intellectual Film Society, and, later, first curator of the film department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, could hardly praise the film enough in her March 1926 review for The Spectator:
A really fine film does so much good not only to the people who enjoy it, but to the cinema as a whole, to its status, that its arrival makes one wish to compel those who do not, for various reasons, usually, enter picture-palaces to go in and see for themselves what films at their best can be. The Black Pirate, Douglas Fairbanks’ new picture at the Tivoli, Strand is such a film. I should like all those who judge the cinema on poor films seen casually, those who condemn it unseen, and those who attribute the peccadillos of small boys as well as the turpitude of the lower classes to the “pernicious influence of the cinema,” to see The Black Pirate … [it] out-tops even R.L. Stevenson for delight in bad, bold buccaneers. It crowds in with subtle harmony majestic sailing ships, bright swordsmanship, the clear green seas and golden sands of the tropics of our dreams. For the film is in colour, the first in which photographic tone and colour have worked together successfully. Blood is blood in this picture! … The Black Pirate is wholly—to steal a phrase from Juno and the Paycock—a darling film. There is no ostentation, no mock morality, no cheap love-making, no error of taste, and, above all, no stupidity in it.
The Black Pirate was one of Barry’s early acquisitions for the MoMA collection but, at some point, several nitrate reels were sent to the British Film Institute (BFI) in London for specialist storage and these reels have been a crucial part of MoMA’s new restoration. Like many others, I have waited many years to see it in its fully restored glory—and am thrilled that the BFI National Archive could help with some of the preserved materials that contributed to its return to the big screen.
The Black Pirate has been accessible to audiences over the years, but most copies in circulation have failed to do justice to the film’s delicate color palette or exist in a version without its original intertitles. The film used an early Technicolor process that captured a limited part of the spectrum in red and green color records; an obsolete technology with an aesthetic that was impossible to recreate authentically in the pre-digital era.
This new restoration by MoMA in cooperation with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation returned to the original two-color Technicolor camera negatives for the first time in half a century to be able to faithfully and respectfully reconstruct the film’s original color scheme using modern digital restoration techniques.
James Layton, manager of MoMA’s Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, explains the complex process of bringing the film back to audiences as near as possible to the original version:
Restoring the film was a huge undertaking due to the sheer amount of material that survives, albeit in varying forms of completeness. The Black Pirate was originally shot with five cameras simultaneously, exposing four separate color negatives and one back-up black-and-white copy. The master A negative was not known to exist, but the B, C and D negatives have all been conserved by the BFI National Archive, although they mostly consist of unedited raw footage across hundreds of film cans. These cans were shipped to the United States for careful review at MoMA. Amazingly, several missing or incomplete shots were located across these negatives that had not been seen in previous reissues of the film. Most surprising was the discovery of three cans of the edited master A negative—previously misidentified—containing Fairbanks’s preferred camera angles and takes. These became central to the restoration, with the remainder of the film ultimately sourced from the secondary B negative, along with a few previously missing shots from the C and D negatives. Several missing intertitles were also digitally recreated. After the film was pieced back together, and the original red and green color records were carefully realigned, the film went through a full 4K digital restoration.
One reel of miscellaneous shots surfaced that was printed using an early version of Technicolor’s famous dye-transfer process. These shots contained the film’s original colors, unfaded, and, along with original documentation and correspondence in Technicolor’s archives, were essential in restoring the film’s original look.
As Film Daily noted at the time “The photography is superb. Technicolor was used throughout. Some of the shots are like the paintings of the old masters in the beauty and splendor of their composition.” Now with this new restoration we can see just what they meant!
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by the Donald Sosin Ensemble
Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation in cooperation with the British Film Institute. Funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Special thanks to Alexander Payne.