Word: valentino
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...Valentino (Edward Small; Columbia), which trades on the name and fame of Rudolph Valentino, tries to look like the late great screen lover's biography, while admitting that except for him "the characters and events portrayed are fictional...
Though played in deadly earnest, Valentino is fun-in the sense that watching the jerky charades of early movies is fun. Its dialogue sounds as hackneyed as silent subtitles read aloud. Its simple-minded love story, which begs for trilling piano accompaniment, seems too naive for Valentino to have enacted even on the screen of the '20s. Its Technicolored Valentino (Anthony Dexter), trysting with the actress wife (Eleanor Parker) of his director (Richard Carlson), pours out his mockpassionate speeches in a thin stream of Midwestern nasality...
Actor Dexter-who in his native Talmadge, Neb. answers to the name of Walter Fleischmann-got the role after 1,784 candidates had been interviewed and 493 tested. In training for three years, he smooches, smirks, tangoes, goes through the motions of re-enacting scenes from such Valentino favorites as The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He succeeds in looking like Valentino when the camera angle is right; most of the time, he looks like a jowly young man caught in a hopeless hoax...
...Valentino's Producer Edward Small spent 13 years getting his movie ready. The project survived 18 versions of the script by some 40 writers, the death of Small's first "discovery" for the title role, the threat that two other producers might rush a Valentino movie...
Last week Producer Small was in for more grief. A libel action was planned by Silent Star Alice Terry, who, like the movie's heroine, played opposite Valentino in a film directed by her husband, the late Rex Ingram. Another suit was announced by Valentino's family-his brother, sister and nephew-who want redress for invasion of privacy and unauthorized use of the Valentino name...