Thank you to writer/educator, WRFI radio host, and WSM collaborator Roger Kimmel Smith for this wonderful piece he wrote for our blog CineFiles, Dream Painters, Tango Pirates, and the Codes of Race and Sex: Notes on Valentino, all about Rudolph Valentino's life, his impact as a Hollywood icon, and his enduring legacy...Take a look below!

Dream Painters, Tango Pirates, and the Codes of Race and Sex: Notes on Valentino

Written by Roger Kimmel Smith
August 2025

"The Eagle" (1925), starring Rudolph Valentino, will be screened on the 99th anniversary of Valentino’s tragic death — Saturday, August 23, 2025, at around 8pm. Wharton Studio Museum’s 15th annual Silent Movie Under the Stars takes place at Robert Treman State Park (Upper Treman) in Ithaca. Live music will be provided by the local band The Djangoners. The event is free and open to the public (a $5 parking fee will be charged). Rain date is Sunday, August 24.

With a name like Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentino d’Antonguolla, you know he had to be an immigrant.

Under the screen name Rudolph Valentino, this thoroughly European man became a Hollywood immortal. His tragic death in 1926, at the age of 31, only burnished the romantic legend he had ignited as a star of the silent cinema. Through the years that followed, countless filmgoers have debated whether his career could have survived the transition to the talkies.

Valentino’s smoldering charisma beams brightly in The Eagle (1925), his penultimate film performance and perhaps the most all-around entertaining movie he made. The Eagle was to be his comeback film, produced at a perilous moment in his career. His last two pictures had been box-office flops. The independent production The Hooded Falcon, into which he had poured more than $100,000, had capsized before being shot. Once more he was at a new studio, United Artists, which was counting on him to produce a bankable hit right away.

Fortunately, the studio surrounded Valentino with top-notch talent. The director of The Eagle, Clarence Brown, would go on to direct another immigrant immortal, Greta Garbo, in such classics as Flesh and the Devil (1926), Anna Christie (1930), and Anna Karenina (1935). Scenario writer Hans Kraly had scripted many of Ernst Lubitsch’s magnificent German and American silents. The supporting cast included the Hungarian beauty Vilma Bánky — whose diaphanous blondeness visually complements Rudy’s dark masculinity — and the Broadway veteran Louise Dresser, who is sensational as Czarina Catherine the Great. The sumptuous production was designed by William Cameron Menzies, fresh off his triumphant art direction for the Douglas Fairbanks masterpiece The Thief of Bagdad (1924). The costume designer, Adrian Greenberg, later known simply as Adrian, had come to Hollywood to work with Valentino and his wife, the designer Natacha Rambova, on the ill-fated Hooded Falcon.

(Oh, and speaking of the perilous moment: did I mention The Eagle was the one where Rambova was banned from the set?)

Fairbanks, a co-founder of UA, was not banned from the set of The Eagle; he visited during shooting and had a profound influence on the finished film. The story was based on a nineteenth-century novel, Dubrovsky, by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin. The film retains the source material’s revenge and romance plot, but tweaks it until it closely parallels the Fairbanks action-adventure-comedy formula perfected in The Mark of Zorro (1920; see my CineFiles blog post from 2024). Valentino’s masked-vigilante alter ego, the Black Eagle, is unmistakably purloined from Zorro.

A glance at the contrasts between Fairbanks and Valentino as screen personae, however, indicates the uniqueness of what Valentino achieved. Both men took full advantage of the motion element in motion pictures, but Fairbanks’ movements tended to be those of an athlete — leaping, vaulting, swooping, dashing. Valentino’s, on the other hand, were more subtle and supple, revealing his background as a vaudeville and nightclub dancer. Fairbanks had evolved from an everyman comic actor into a swashbuckling action hero, retaining a lighthearted, optimistic personality. Valentino’s first screen roles had been darker: as heavies, villains, Apache dancers, gigolos, suspicious European nobles, and assorted ethnic types. In Eyes of Youth (1919), the film that got him noticed by the influential screenwriter June Mathis, he plays a con man hired to compromise the leading lady in a divorce entrapment.

In short, Douglas Fairbanks embodied a so-called “all-American” — that is, Anglo-Saxon and middle-class — type of masculinity. (Off-screen, don’t forget, he wooed and won “America’s Sweetheart” herself, Mary Pickford.) Needless to say, the former Rodolfo Guglielmi had no chance of accessing this kind of wholesome-sauce image. Valentino’s appeal was stranger, more improbable, and more dangerous, drawing upon cultural elements from outside the American mainstream.

He was firmly an immigrant, a southern European. Had he tried to immigrate from Castellenata in 1925, the year The Eagle was made, he probably would not have gotten in; the Johnson-Reed reform bill passed the previous year ended up reducing Italian immigration specifically by 90 percent.

Moreover, Valentino embodied an unusual variety of manhood combining Continental manners and refinements with raw, panther-like, animalistic sensuality. That combination struck the early 1920s U.S. audience with a shock and violated the genteel, Victorian sensibilities of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. That culture habitually deflected, concealed, and denied overt sexuality, and one of its most enduring means of doing so was to associate such lasciviousness with the other, with foreign, darker-skinned people (as indeed, it could and did associate all manner of vice and crime with the swarthier races).

Here we have, in a nutshell, the origins of “the Latin lover.”

To be clear, while two of Valentino’s first roles as a leading player (in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922)) were in fact Latin characters, he also played Western Europeans, an Indian rajah, and most famously, the titular Sheikh Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik (1921). Only an exotic, it seems safe to say, could have gotten away with those bulbous, obscene lust-eyes Valentino trains on Agnes Ayres in The Sheik’s celebrated rape scene — truly X-rated eyes.

(He was also nearsighted. The writer Adela Rogers St. Johns was sure that accounted for the whole sleepy-eyed mystique.)

While we’re on the subject of The Sheik, consider for a moment its source material: the British novel published in 1919 by E. M. Hull, E for Elizabeth. A surprise U.S. best-seller predicated on the romance between the spunky Lady Diana Nayo and the tribal chieftain who abducts and rapes her in the North African desert. In other words, it seems clear it’s not in spite of but because of the illicit, strictly consent-free nature of the erotic fantasy that this romance novel, and its screen adaptation, hit the jackpot. Map that onto the codes of race and sex alluded to above, I submit, and you are starting to penetrate the Valentino phenomenon.

It also must be noted that the man’s beautiful face and form, physical and kinetic grace, and dandyish tastes in fashion and jewelry all led many detractors to deride his style as effeminate and to launch a torrent of homophobic insinuations, culminating in the 1926 “pink powder puff” Chicago Tribune swipe that gnawed at him in those days right before he fell ill and died. To this day, his actual sexual orientation has never been authenticated, although it is widely taken for granted that both of the women he married, Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova (the latter, Salt Lake City-born, also known as Winifred Hudnut), had had lesbian affairs.

(And yes, there was his arrest for bigamy, but let’s not go there…)

Yet the fact remains of this silent film actor’s explosively erotic impact on female audiences during his short career. On screen, he transmits intensity and sensitivity, a noteworthy emotional range for a leading man, as well as that perennially seductive sense of mystery or opacity. We can deduce that he understood the value of such strategic ambiguity from his famous quote that it’s his screen image, not himself, to which his fans responded, that “I am merely the canvas upon which the women paint their dreams.”

Both on screen and off, his nature was that of a romantic — a dreamer, a spiritual inquirer, an appreciator of the fine arts and poetry. The author of a book of poems, Day Dreams (Macfadden Publications, 1923). Effusive in his affections, always in love, like young Romeo of fair Verona.

The dance with which he is associated, significantly, is the tango, the Latin dance of slow, close, intimate, passionate movement, of sensuality and perhaps some brutalities of dominance and submission. His extended tango scene with Beatrice Dominguez in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was, by many accounts, the moment that assured his stardom. But that screen triumph derived from his earlier experiences as a taxi dancer, a dancer for hire, in Maxim’s restaurant on 38th Street and other New York dance floors.

They called them “tango pirates,” or “lounge lizards,” or “gigolos.” This is another fascinating period of Valentino’s life story. He had already learned tango before reaching Ellis Island around Christmas of 1913. Fresh off the boat, living more or less hand to mouth, he discovered New York was enthralled in the social dancing craze of which Vernon and Irene Castle were the leading exponents. His dancing prowess eventually won him good money and even better training. Dancing retail, as it were, for and at the pleasure of one’s partner alone, certainly differs from dancing on stage or on the silent screen, but Rudy’s dance card included all three and, making it look easy, he conquered them in turn.

And believe me, there’s so much more juicy stuff in this guy’s life story — not even to mention his death, and ensuing immortality. Just for fun, let’s go back to the question I left hanging at the beginning: had he lived longer, could Valentino have succeeded in the talkies? I like to think he could have overcome the obstacles, as he had overcome so many already. I can imagine him dancing up a storm in musicals, singing at least passably (as he did, arguably, in his single gramophone session), and bringing real steam into some of those pre-Code romance plots. Come to think of it, he might have done just as well outside Hollywood; I’m thinking of that other towering tango champion, the Argentine singer Carlos Gardel, who starred in nine feature films before his own untimely death in 1935.

Enough fantasy sport, I suppose: but bear in mind, there are still people in our century who claim to be in communion with Valentino through esoteric channels. Absent supernatural means, I know of no better way to experience the man’s magic than to come watch The Eagle fly under the stars.

Oh, and P.S.—it seems confirmed that our Signor Rodolfo appeared as an extra in the Wharton Brothers serial Patria (1917), starring Mrs. Vernon Castle. We spot him standing center-frame in a tuxedo in the dance hall sequence of Episode 4, “Double-Crossed.” As we know, he was working in dance halls when this serial was made, and was heavier than he would be when stardom came. Could this have been his very first screen appearance?

Rodolfo appearing as an extra in the Wharton Brothers serial Patria (1917)

ROGER KIMMEL SMITH is a freelance wordsmith based in Ithaca. He hosts “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” (“music and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s, in all genres and from around the world”), airing Fridays 12–2pm on WRFI Community Radio. He has curated and introduced two Silent Movie Month screenings on the theme of Women in Early Silent Film. He is a former producer and co-host of the podcast “When Humanists Attack!!”

SOURCES:

Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Leider, Emily W. Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

Shulman, Irving. Valentino. Trident Press, 1967.

IMAGE INFO:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vilma_B%C3%A1nky-Rudolph_Valentino_in_The_Eagle.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Eagle_(1925)_-_8.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Natacha_Rambova_%26_Rudolph_Valentino_-_Jun_1925_EH.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tango_scene_from_The_Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse.jpg

Video screenshot of Patria courtesy of The Serial Squadron.
Posted to YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFUCd-T8w_k; screenshot at 43 min, 51 seconds.
Available on The Wharton Serials Collection (Blu-Ray).