AllMovie

Don Caesar de Bazan (William Farnum) falls in love with Maritana (Estelle Taylor), when he sees her dancing before Queen Isabel's court. But Prime Minister Don Jose (Paul Cazeneuve) has other plans for the girl -- he wants to use her to compromise King Charles (Harry Southard), so that the queen (Dorothy Drake) will fall into his hands. To further his plan, Don Jose has Don Caesar jailed for dueling and tells Maritana he will be pardoned if she marries him. She readily complies, but the Prime Minister just wanted her to have a title to make her more attractive to the king. After the ceremony, he sends Don Caesar to be executed. The villain doesn't realize that a boy who Don Caesar has befriended has loaded the soldier's guns with blanks. Don Caesar "miraculously" comes back to life, exposes the Prime Minister's intrigues and wins the ministership (he's already won the girl). In early 1920, nobody was much interested in costume dramas (rarely a popular medium in film, really), so the trades tried to sell this picture -- based on a famous play, Don Caesar de Bazan), by E. Lloyd Sheldon -- with its action quotient, which included a lot of swordplay. Of course, when Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro came out later in the year, this kind of swashbuckling adventure tale became classic cinematic fare.