The Black Pirate is a 1926 American silent color adventure film directed by Albert Parker, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Donald Crisp, Sam De Grasse, and Anders Randolf.
After the first natural color films appeared in 1922, Douglas Fairbanks envisioned a color pirate film. However, he waited to start production until 1925. Once Technicolor had improved its filming and printing capacity, Fairbanks took financial risks due to the added costs and fragility of the film process. He also hesitated because color was rumored to distract from the narrative and strain viewers' eyes.
To address these concerns, Fairbanks avoided Technicolor's saturated tones and instead chose a restricted palette, inspired by Flemish painters and American illustrators who had popularized pirate themes in the early twentieth century. His team spent months testing and refining color control for all on-screen elements, including the studio-created ocean. This focus on visual consistency also led to the simplification of the story, contributing to the film's success. Fairbanks continued to deliver his signature acrobatic stunts.
The film achieved international success, notably for its colors, but suffered from the fragility of its two-strip laminated film. This issue prompted Technicolor to abandon the process and develop a more durable single-strip film, which was later used for some prints. The Black Pirate became both a commercial and technical milestone, showcasing Fairbanks's influence, while also exposing the process's limitations.
In his subsequent films, Fairbanks considered using Technicolor again but gave up on it for various reasons. In 1928, when Technicolor felt that it had overcome the difficulties encountered with The Black Pirate, it produced The Viking (1928) as a demonstration, for which Fairbanks' film would serve as a hidden model. Other successful films, including The Black Swan (1942) with Tyrone Power, and The Crimson Pirate (1952) with Burt Lancaster would further exploit the link he had imagined between pirates and Technicolor.
In 1993, The Black Pirate was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Plot
Pirates capture, badly maul, and loot a ship. After relieving the ship and crew of valuables, the pirates fire the ship, blowing up the gunpowder on board, sinking her. While the pirates celebrate, two survivors wash up on an island: an old man and his son. Before dying, the older man gives his signet ring to his son. His son buries him, vowing vengeance.
The Pirate Captain and Lieutenant bring some crew to the other side of the same island to bury some of their plunder. They then plan to murder the other pirates: "Dead men tell no tales." But first, the son appears as the "Black Pirate", who offers to join their company and fight their best man to prove his worth. After much fighting, the Black Pirate kills the Pirate Captain. The Pirate Lieutenant sneers and says there is more to being a pirate than sword tricks. To further prove his worth, the Black Pirate says he will capture the next ship of prey single-handed, which he does. He then uses his wits to prevent the pirates from blowing up the ship along with the crew and passengers, suggesting that they hold the ship for ransom.
When a beautiful woman is discovered on board, the Pirate Lieutenant claims her. Being in love at first sight for her, the Black Pirate finds a way to temporarily save her from this fate by presenting her as a "princess" and urging the crew to use her as a hostage to ensure their ransom will be paid, as long as she remains "spotless and unharmed".
The pirates cheer the Black Pirate and want to name him captain. The Pirate Lieutenant jeers but consents to wait to see if the ransom is paid by noon the next day. However, he secretly has a confederate destroy the ransom ship later that night to ensure it will not return. Then, when the Black Pirate is caught trying to release the woman, the Pirate Lieutenant exposes him as a traitor, and the pirates force him to walk the plank.
At noon the next day, with the ransom ship having failed to show, the Pirate Lieutenant goes to the woman to claim his prize. But just then, the Black Pirate, who with the help of the sympathetic one-armed pirate MacTavish had survived being sent overboard, returns, leading troops to stop the pirates. After a long fight, the pirates are routed. In the end, the Black Pirate is revealed to be a Duke, and the "Princess" he loves is a noble Lady. Even MacTavish is moved to tears of joy by the happy ending.
Cast
Douglas Fairbanks as The Duke of Arnoldo / "The Black Pirate" Billie Dove as Princess Isobel Anders Randolf as Pirate Captain Donald Crisp as MacTavish Tempe Pigott as Duenna Sam De Grasse as Pirate Lieutenant Charles Stevens as Powder Man Charles Belcher as Chief Passenger (Nobleman) E. J. Ratcliffe as The Governor John Wallace as Peg-Leg Pirate Fred Becker as Pirate Nino Cochise as Pirate (uncredited) Jimmy Dime as Pirate (uncredited) George Holt as Pirate (uncredited) Harold Kruger as Pirate (uncredited) Charles Lewis as Pirate (uncredited) Barry Norton as Youth (uncredited) Mary Pickford as Princess Isobel In Final Embrace (uncredited cameo) Bob Roper as Pirate (uncredited)
Production Precedents The Black Pirate is considered "one of the silent films that is best remembered" Part of that reputation is based on the plot, but above all on the fact that it was one of the first films shot with the Technicolor two-tone process, which was rare and very expensive at the time. The Black Pirate is often referred to as the first "good" color film, with a "level of quality [of colour] never before seen in a feature film." Given the limitations of the process used, it is also a "flawed but strangely beautiful artifact". According to his son, Fairbanks was "the first to make a feature film in color", despite the prohibitive cost and technical problems, spending "a whole year with laboratory experiments to find the combination that would be the most restful for the eye" and choosing a chromatic choice that "no one had ever thought of".
However, the film is far from being the first to use colors. These have been present since the earliest days of cinema, not to perfect an illusion of realism, but as an ornamental and spectacular attraction. In 1926, when Fairbanks' film was released, 80 to 85% of film productions featured color effects, mainly by tinting or toning. These are arbitrary colors, added with dyes, and are supposed to connote the psychological atmosphere of the scene. On the other hand, the colors of The Black Pirate are supposed to be natural, i.e., produced by the subject's light imprint alone "in such a way that the colors are exclusively chosen and reproduced by optical and mechanical means". The opposition between natural and artificial colors dates back to the introduction in the 1910s of the first natural color process, Kinemacolor, the predecessor of Technicolor and a competitor of the Pathécolor process, which used stencil coloring. However, for technical reasons, the supposedly "natural" processes of Kinemacolor and then Technicolor are based on compression, simplifying the removal of blue, one of the three primary components of color, to retain only a "duotone" of red and green. The lack of fidelity in certain parts of the spectrum, combined with other technical problems, leads to a paradoxical situation where processes that are supposed to give colors greater veracity, or even a "sterecopic" quality, present worse results in some respects than those deemed artificial and subjective. Like its predecessor, Technicolor has a complex relationship with competing processes, sometimes opposing them in the name of the distinction between the natural and the artificial and sometimes in the name of the aesthetic quality of the result, the cinematographic color being compared to that of the painting of the "old masters".
Technicolor Process No. 2 used for Fairbanks' film is a process for rendering natural colors by duotone developed in 1921 and which represented a significant improvement over Technicolor No. 1, for which the Technicolor company had been established in 1915. Process No. 1, two-tone like its successor, had the disadvantage of requiring the separate projection of the green and red recordings, the two images being superimposed on the screen, by additive synthesis, with the inevitable colored fringes as soon as the subject was in motion. On the contrary, in process number 2, called subtractive synthesis, the red and green recordings are glued back-to-back to form just one single reel, usable with the projector model available in all theaters.
The Black Pirate is not the first subtractive duotone fiction film; however, this primacy belongs to The Glorious Adventure, directed by James Stuart Blackton in Prizma Color and released in 1922. It was also not the first film made entirely in Technicolor No. 2, since it was preceded by Chester M. Franklin's The Toll of the Sea, a medium-length film also released in 1922 and produced by the Technicolor company to promote its process. The Glorious Aventure demonstrates the ability of the Prizma Color process to delicately reproduce skin tones, while exposing himself to reproach for "stained glass effects" that seem to be directly derived from magic lantern views and for poorly proportioned costume colors and backgrounds, Bernard Eisenschitz even believes that "all the critics" condemn the colors.
The Toll of the Sea, on the other hand, has a well-defined and stable image, with bright orange and red tones, but a tendency towards brown and impasto in the rendering of vegetal exteriors and distances. Repeating the choices of the inventors of Kinemacolor, Technicolor's engineers prioritize skin tones and sacrifice the blue of the sea and sky, which leads to a "paradoxical coexistence of the natural and the ornamental". Professionals enthusiastically receive both films and help to create a demand for natural colors, due to the disappearance of the effects of colored fringes of previous processes and the beauty of subtractive duotone, perceived as providing "everything that can be desired", particularly the rendering of flesh tones which acquire the quality of "exquisite" paintings "endowed with life" However, it would take four years for a second film, made entirely in Technicolor, to be released, which would be Fairbanks'.