Review: 'Zorro' is L.A.'s masked hero, but France makes him magnifique

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Set us as preferred If you were a TV show, nothing would be more certain to gain my attention than to be a French-made, French-language series about Zorro, the masked vigilante swordsman of old Los Angeles.Sword fighting plus cape plus Francophilia plus hometown pride equals yes, please.Introduced in Johnston McCulley’s 1919 serialized novel, “The Curse of Capistrano” (with some 60 stories to follow), a kid of Californio Robin Hood cum Scarlet Pimpernel, the character jumped quickly to the screen in the 1920 “The Mark of Zorro,” with Douglas Fairbanks demonstrating his remarkable facility for parkour before anyone thought to call it that.It was remade in 1940 with Tyrone Power; later, comic-book canon made it the film the family was leaving the night Bruce Wayne’s family was killed; in any case, there’s a whole lot of Zorro in Batman).

Antonio Banderas played the character twice, in “The Mask of Zorro” (1998) and “The Legend of Zorro” (2005).Most significant, in the late 1950s, it became the basis of a Disney-produced TV series, starring Guy Williams, who is Zorro, I’d imagine, to most people, here and abroad.It has had a long, international afterlife; you can watch it now on Disney+.

(France has local history with the character, Alain Delon having played him in the 1975 “Zorro.”) It might not have been the most consistently exploited IP over the last century, but who doesn’t know Zorro? Hands? Just as I thought.The new “Zorro,” arriving here Tuesday on MHz Choice, some two years after its European debut, is a thoroughly original and quite wonderful take on the material; it’s one of my favorite new shows this year, possibly the one that made me happiest.Starring Jean Dujardin, whom American audiences will know as the star of the 2011 silent film “The Artist,” which won him an Oscar for...