FROM THE VAULTS: Celebrate Valentino's day

DVDs recall the career of star of silent movies

By Gary Arnold (Contact) | Sunday, September 7, 2008

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The young immigrant destined to achieve fame in Hollywood as Rudolph Valentino was born with an abundance of name — Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaele Pierre Philibert Guglielmi — in Castellaneta, Italy, in 1895. It's fun to imagine that friends might have called him Fonzie as well as Rudy.

The son of an army veterinarian, Rodolfo washed out of a military academy while still in his teens and then failed to discover a professional niche in Paris, circa 1912. He arrived in New York City a year later and eventually caught on as a professional dancer, acquiring associations off stage that landed him in jail at one point and allowed him to be caricatured later as a professional gigolo.

He also made some influential friends, notably the famous theatrical actress Alla Nazimova, who vouched for him during a low point in New York and later cast him as Armand in her 1920 movie version of "Camille." Seeking a fresh start in the West, the future Valentino resumed work as a dancer in San Francisco and then gravitated to Los Angeles, where he hoped to ingratiate himself in the film industry and began playing bit roles in 1918.

The Valentino starring career was a five-year whirlwind, commencing in 1921 with "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" and ending suddenly with his death in August of 1926 from a perforated ulcer. This calamity triggered a wave of public grief from demonstrative fans, some of whom had made fainting fits a recurrent public spectacle when his movies were big attractions.

After the untimely death a morbid cult of Valentino was sustained for decades, anticipating a phenomenon of mass culture that was duplicated in the wake of James Dean's fatal car crash in 1955. It may or may not be echoed in the case of Heath Ledger.

Rudolph Valentino was not the first major star of the pioneering movie industry to die young. Robert Harron, the boyish lead in several D.W. Griffith classics, died in 1920 of an accidental gunshot wound. He was 25. Wallace Reid had perished notoriously of morphine addiction and alcoholism in 1922, age 32. The new medium revealed a double-edged capacity to facilitate immortality in one respect while hastening oblivion in another.

Two recent DVD editions make it easier to evaluate the Valentino career: a double-bill of "The Sheik" and "The Son of the Sheik" from Image Entertainment and a two-disc anthology called "Valentino" from Flicker Alley. The latter restores fragments of three "lost" films made between 1918 and 1922 ("A Society Sensation," "Stolen Moments" and "The Young Rajah"), showcases a largely intact feature of 1922 ("Moran of the Lady Letty") and appends some irresistible tidbits, notably promotional shorts of the period called "A Trip to Paramountown" and "Screen Snapshots."

There were five Valentino pictures released in 1921, the year of his breakthrough. The craze got in full preposterous swing with "The Sheik," an eminently hootable period piece that casts him as a romantically impetuous Bedouin. The hero abducts aristocrat Agnes Ayres on horseback and then redeems himself as captivity drags on by revealing a gallant and solicitous nature. It's difficult to account for the movie's popularity at this late date, since it appears to run out of melodramatic or erotic fuel very prematurely.

The upside: The creakiness of the original enhances the virtues of "Son of the Sheik," the last Valentino movie, a breezy and stylish demonstration that some sequels have always been emphatically superior to the prototypes.

Among other improvements "Son" permits the star to enact scenes with himself, as father and son. These trick-shot interludes bring out a playful enthusiasm that flatters the star's essentially genial personality. One brainstorm: Dad angrily bends an iron bar, prompting junior to unbend it.

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