American Aristocracy

Douglas Fairbanks, 1916, Triangle: a young inventor fights an arms smuggler and woos a rich girl. Lloyd Ingraham directed. Fairbanks before the swashbucklers, still the athletic American boy, vaulting hedges instead of ships. It is a wartime picture about class as a sport, and Fairbanks is already the body the 1920s would hire to represent a country.