When I was a kid I watched the Sheik to see what the fuss was about and came away unimpressed. I chalked the Valentino Thing up to adult weirdness, that inexplicable X-factor which causes apparently sane humans to pretend that yappy, rodent-like dogs are cute, or to spend good, hard-won money on things like pedicures. In fact, now that I've seen several of his films, it turns out his most famous role may be his least accessible to the modern audience, with its eye-popping lust and maniacal laughter.
I got curious about him again because someone in that TCM series called Moguls and Movie Stars was talking about Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and she said, "When Valentino stood up to do that tango he was nobody. By the time he sat down, he was a star." And it's absolutely true! His charisma is full-bore, no-holds-barred, straight out of the gate. Apocalypse wasn't his first film (in fact, it was his 22nd or so, if you count the ones in which he was only dancing), but it was his first starring vehicle, and his star-quality is there from the first shots. Even before he tangos, the way he smokes a cigarette reeks of sexual confidence. He smoked in all his films. He had a way with a cigarette. I'm fair certain a generation of young men probably died of lung cancer trying to capture that same je-ne-sais-quoi.
With all my newfound enthusiasm for the man, imagine my utter dismay when I finally got for my birthday a copy of David Thomsen's New Biographical Dictionary of Film only to find that he doesn't "get" Valentino, dismisses him as a "flimsy being" and "clearly...no actor". He "gets" the Duke (he'd better, or he's no expert), lauds him as a great star, rather than a great actor. So why not Valentino?
It takes some transition time, adjusting to these old movies, because silent film acting involves posing and extremes of expression which test our modern comfort-levels, but Valentino is amazingly naturalistic during much of Horsemen, and, indeed, throughout many of his films. By the time we get to Son of the Sheik, his swansong, he's less so, no doubt mirroring the feverish style of the original. But I swear: when he's kissing up the inside of Vilma Banky's arm, then the palm of her hand, you can feel it on your own skin. He has an immediacy of flesh appeal, a physical presence which broadcasts itself right off the screen in the way that Brando's did in Streetcar, a quality which would have made him a star in any era.
Despite the muscular virility he communicates onscreen, there is an androgyny about him and he was dogged in his day (and haunted on his untimely deathbed) by near-hysterical accusations of unmanliness. The only modern equivalent that comes to mind, and it is of only passing similarity, is the near-universal male puzzlement at the near-universal female swooning over Captain Jack Sparrow. It's hard to remember now, after the weary-inducing ennui of three mediocre sequels, but the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was a revelation of joy, and Johnny Depp was catapulted from "devastatingly handsome but strange character actor" to "Sexiest Man in the World" status overnight. And the guys didn't see it. I suspect there was not a female between twelve and eighty who did not get the annoyed query from spouse, boyfriend, or any other heterosexual male in her circle: "Really? But he's so EFFEMINATE." In these metrosexual-friendly days, a star can shrug off or even exult in such confusion, the stress of which was more troubling in those days of violently-enforced homogeneity.
He had the most wonderful hands, Valentino, and a dancer's grace in moving. In the very strange and occasionally magnificent Blood and Sand, there's a sadomasochistic relationship between him and dragon-woman dominatrix Nita Naldi. In the scene where she incites him to mad jealousy by flirting with a bandit, he moves with exaggerated machismo toward the bandit then folds into a sinuous, Nijinsky-esque "S" shape while she torments him. His body is extraordinarily communicative as well as athletic, and, seducer that he is, much of his charm rests on a James Dean boyishness: witness the way he looks after Gloria Swanson, hands in pockets, from the porch of the Swiss inn in Beyond the Rocks.
On the other hand, he could smoulder like nobody else. Although certainly nobody wants to be raped in the desert, every woman wants to look across a crowded room and see the man she forcefully desires smouldering with desire for her. Today, only Antonio Banderas comes close.
I love that the women in his films are rarely what you'd call pretty. Either they are striking but gorgon-like, like Swanson or Naldi, with her vast, soft expanse of back, --which I love!--, or they're pinched and ridiculous as in the Married Virgin and the Sheik, or just very ordinary looking, like Dorothy Dalton in Moran of the Lady Letty (a low-key favorite of mine). It makes him the lover of Everywoman. One of Krishna's greatest miracles was at Vrindavan when he made love to a thousand cowherd girls on the same night. I imagine that sitting in a cinema in 1926 watching Son of the Sheik was a little like that: one man making love simultaneously to entire cinemas filled with women, all across the land.
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