Word: idolizers
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Nureyev's Valentino is mostly a credible performance, but he is no nascent film star. No glaring flaws scar his rendition of the silent film idol; he delivers a convincing Italian accent, and the spectacle of star-struck women clustering about this Valentino is plausible. The script wisely makes use of Nureyev's awesome talents on a dance floor at several stages, and the opportunity to watch him glide through tangos briefly takes one's mind off the film's many lesser moments. Russell did choose good raw material for the title character, but the script he co-authored with...
...this irrepressible streak. But in the film this trait is largely neglected until the concluding portion, when Russell decides to end the film with a famous boxing exhibition between a tubercular Valentino and a reporter from a New York paper that had published a scathing criticism of the film idol. To wind up the movie with this inherently ludicrous vignette raises some doubts as to Russell's real attitude towards his subject. The prima donna in Valentino dominates the film from start to finish, letting through only brief glimpses of the man's more admirable traits. He deserved better...
...Boston). It is this kind of contradiction that gives depth to the character of someone it would otherwise be all to easy to dismiss as a facile, blotting-paper intellectual, a worthless dilettante with an inordinate passion for shop-girls, racehorses and opium (which he called his "black idol...
...fame he achieved, strictly and forever down home. He defined himself, as Critic Greil Marcus points out in an excellent Presley essay, "by presenting his authentic multiplicity. I am, he announced, a house rocker, a boy steeped in mother-love, a true son of the church, a matinee idol who's only kidding, a man with too many rough edges for anyone ever to smooth away. Something in me yearns for a settling of affairs, he said with his pale music and his tired movies; on the other hand, he answered with his rock 'n' roll...
...sings my songs sings them better than me." In truth, he caught on quickly as a performer. Lean and bearded, he radiated both a searing sexuality and a boyish vulnerability. That combination was translated into a fast rise in movies. His first, Cisco Pike (1971), about a pop idol down on his luck, merely suggested his film potential. Several more -Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Blume in Love, Alice Doesn 't Live Here Anymore -followed. Last year's A Star Is Born, in which he played Barbra Streisand's aging, self-destructive mentor, made Kristofferson...