A truly remarkable feat, spawning the all-too familiar paint by numbers form of conventional storytelling, a pastiche of every stereotyped and derivative film ever produced. Yet it was the first! And to be the first is everything, a genius and a success! To provide the very palette and template that blended genres must follow, the formula that is the logic of staging entirely for action and effect. This is why it can’t be neatly typecast. It is equally horror, melodrama, love-story, swashbuckler fantasy, comedy, adventure. I am tempted to anoint it the grand eponym of the tradition, the film of films, the first genuine film ever made, upon which every subsequent reincarnation must be subsumed and pay homage. A fitting baptism for both the history of film and the bloodbaths and carnage of the 20th century and beyond: the rictus.