Word: valentino
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...VALENTINO. Directed by Ken Russell. Screenplay by Russell and Martin...
...Rudolph Valentino was among the most put-upon of movie stars. Forced to live in-and with-a screen persona that could not have been at wider variance from his true spirit; bearing the crushing load of fame in an era unfamiliar with violations of privacy; bewildered by two absurd marriages and harassed by studio bosses intent on protecting their "property" at the expense of the man, he provides the stuff of primal screen drama...
...usual, Russell hammers one over the head with gaudy and excessive cliches of a bygone era's decor. They have a certain visual excitement, but they say more about his own feverish temperament than about the spirit of the age. The use of Rudolf Nureyev for Rudolph Valentino was canny in conception-both men display an animal magnetism that audiences have found irresistible. But Rudy I had a very different appeal from Rudy II; the Valentino swagger was manifestly a device to hide his vulnerability and naiveté. Nureyev is an athlete, a sophisticated stage performer bewildered only...
This leaves only one species for whom Russell can produce a kind word-and we are to understand that homosexuality is the sole source of Valentino's saintly patience and stoic courage. To illustrate this, the director concocts a sequence in which the star challenges one of his macho journalistic tormentors to a boxing match, takes a vicious beating but finally kayoes the nasty man, in the style of a gay Rocky...
Even so, the movie is likely to garner attention - largely because it delves so deeply into the Hollywood Babylon. Scandal animates every scene, and, according to the standards of the time, over heated melodrama becomes the order of the day. Pop Singer Michelle Phillips, for example, plays Natacha Rambova, Valentino's culturally aspiring second wife, as if she were trying out for a school play that unaccountably contains a nude love scene...