The Iron Mask

The Iron Mask (1929)

King Louis XIII is thrilled to have born to him a son – an heir to the throne. But when the queen delivers a twin, Cardinal Richelieu sees the second son as a potential for revolution, and has him shipped off to Spain to be raised in secret to ensure a peaceful future for France. Alas, keeping the secret means sending Constance, lover of D'Artagnan, off to a convent. D'Artagnan hears of this and rallies the Musketeers in a bid to rescue her.

Data de estreia
1929-02-21
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (34)
Duração
1 h 43 min
Géneros
Aventura, História
Realizador
Allan Dwan
Coleção
The Three Musketeers (Silent era)

Elenco

Curiosidades

  • Baseado em: O Visconde de Bragelonne

The Iron Mask is a 1929 American part-talkie adventure film directed by Allan Dwan. In addition to some sequences with dialogue, the film featured a synchronized musical score with sound effects and a theme song.

Production background

Fairbanks lavished resources on his last silent film with the knowledge he was bidding farewell to his beloved genre. This marks the only time where Fairbanks's character dies at the end of the film, with the closing scene depicting the once-again youthful Musketeers all reunited in death, moving on (as the final title says) to find "greater adventure beyond".

The original 1929 release has only two short sequences of dialogue which consisted of speeches delivered by Fairbanks. The rest of the film features a musical score with a few sound effects and a theme song that is sung and played several times.

In 1952, the film was reissued, with the intertitles removed and a narration voiced by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. added. The original film included a scene in which d'Artagnan tells the young King of an embarrassing adventure involving him and the three musketeers. The story is told in flashback but the 1952 version has it in chronological order with the scene with the King cut out.

In 1999, with the cooperation of the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Kino Video released a DVD of the 1929 version. A complete set of Vitaphone disks exists for this picture. However, only a small portion of the original sound from these was synchronized with film footage, namely the two short sequences in which Douglas Fairbanks speaks.

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