If you were a boy at the turn of the last century, you had your choice of two fantasies. The first was to be part of Dracula. Perhaps that boy dreams of himself as Van Helsing, the outcast who becomes the center of our hopes of dominating the darkness; perhaps, more interestingly, he dreams of himself as Count Dracula himself. The second fantasy, and surely this must have appealed to the same sort of boy who would dream of becoming a Jedi Knight some generations later, is to be the hero of The Prisoner of Zenda. The swordplay, the lovely lady, the castles, the intrigue. It is the perfect little male maelstrom which boys (and their barely evolved manly forms) have been sucked into. Being a man myself, I look at The Prisoner of Zenda and see, as many other men see, one of the most entertaining movies ever made. No matter how dour and responsible Ronald Colman is, the rest of the film sings around him in a masquerade of colorful characters.

The chief villain, the potential usurper of the throne, is Raymond Massey’s Duke Michael. As much as I like Massey, his work was always a little one-note, and that note is decidedly flat. The villain who stands out in Zenda, the one who gets that climactic swordfight in the end, is Rupert. The younger Douglas Fairbanks is just wonderful. He looks like someone who can wear the name “Rupert of Hentzau” and only say it with a little hint of a smile. He always wears all black, for no good villain would be seen even with white trim on his uniform. (One finds him slapping at his black uniform occasionally to knock off the schmutz; surely not even a villain as devious as Rupert would dare to have a cat at home.) In movies, there are those villains who shock us with their wickedness, their thirst for blood, their dismissal of basic norms. Then there are the villains who twirl their mustaches and laugh at their own jokes, inviting us to laugh along with them because we’re in on the joke. Few have ever done the latter type better than Fairbanks, Jr., who understands full well that this movie will only be as exciting as he makes it.

Among these very late Victorian characters, Rupert alone feels like the truly modern man. He has no loyalties, and we can only define his self-interest as “Roarkian.” He is working for Michael not because he cares who sits on the throne but because serving Michael might give him the spoils he seeks. In one of my favorite scenes in the film, Rupert has a little talk with Colman’s Rassendyll. Say, my brother [paraphrased], why not pretend to be the king indefinitely, and then reward me with vast estates and some favors down the line? It’s a lovely distillation of Rupert. Rassendyll and his ilk will die for loyalty and king, whereas Michael will risk all for power. Both of these are ideas that the boy wielding a long stick as a sword can understand. But Rupert is too old for a story told for those this young. Rupert wants to live in a big house, put his feet up, and take a little nap after a big dinner.