VALENTINO: Ken Russell's Under-Appreciated Masterpiece

by Joseph Lanza






Ken Russell’s Valentino is like an orphaned child who deserves to be rediscovered and finally loved. Upon its American release in the fall of 1977, it got lambasted by some critics, excoriated by anti-homo Valentino fanatics who loathed seeing their hero dancing with a man, and disowned by the great director himself, even though Russell has, at times, given it some of the credit it deserves.

The truth, at least according to this writer, is that Valentino is one of Russell’s best films since his masterwork, The Devils. Granted, there are some flaws (mostly due to a couple of less-than-stellar supporting roles), but they are minor compared to the Russell magic: the snappy and often sniping dialogue, the mixture of camp comedy with unrelenting pain and violence, the seductive music (a score consisting mostly of excerpts from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite and some moody compositions by the score’s conductor Stanley Black), Shirley Russell’s period costumes, the set designs that pay tribute to Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau in general, and of course, Russell’s own ambivalence over the role of art in a world where commercialism and the graven image can often destroy rather than inspire.

Valentino also has vibrant photography. And since Russell started as a stills photographer, he tended to exert control over the "official" cinematographers on his feature films. In this case, according to accounts I've read, Peter Suschitzky (who would go on to photograph David Cronenberg's later films) abandoned his original plans for softer focus to satisfy Russell's desire for sharper edges with lots of primary colors that, at times, provide a near-comic-book effect. Sometimes (perhaps intentionally), the film's pacing and hysterical dialogue delivery evoke the sixties series, Batman. There are moments when Russell and Suschitzky recreate the golden, sepia-toned tint that was popular during the silent era. (Unfortunately and inexplicably, the film's recent airing on Turner Classic Movies replaced the sepia with a washed-out black and white.)

As with his 1966 BBC documentary Isadora (about the life of Isadora Duncan), Russell approximates the Citizen Kane-style narrative, as the dead protagonist’s life unfolds from the perspectives of those who did their best to either help him or hurt him. Valentino is also officially based on the Brad Steiger and Chaw Mank biography, Valentino: An Intimate Expose of the Sheik, but its tone is also similar to Irving Shulman’s Valentino – an enjoyable book that many Valentino devotees revile but that anticipates Russell’s satirical voice. Shulman’s style, like Russell’s dialogue, shoots out flowery volleys and crass quips the way Ben Hecht’s novels and screenplays lampoon potentates and pretenders of the stage and screen. And like Shulman’s account, the film centers on the personalities who assemble to see their idol lying in state at Campbell’s Funeral Parlor.

Valentino reminds me of Specter of the Rose, the 1946 film that Ben Hecht wrote and directed. Here, Andre Sanine, a ballet dancer (played by a dashing and quirky actor with the pseudo-Russian name, Ivan Kirov) seduces the art whores around him with his graceful moves. He is also a schizoid psychopath with a yen for stabbing his sweethearts whenever hearing an otherwise pretty musical phrase. Despite the horror that their savior in tights ultimately represents, Sanine’s followers chirp on and on about the beauty of art and how Sanine will redeem them. A slob of a “poet” (Lionel Stander) blathers on and on about languishing in “the foxholes of art,” the oily and effeminate impresario (Michael Chekhov) bamboozles silly rich folks out of their funds to put on his shows, and an old and cranky ballet instructor (Judith Evans) occasionally breaks out of her pink cloud to warn Sanine’s latest girlfriend that her life is in danger.

Just as in Valentino, the characters blurt out dialogue with often-caustic intensity as they dwell in a world that is half hyped and only half human. Dancers and thespians flutter across the screen like aimless rose petals or festoons of blood. “The rose has a thorn,” Sanine mutters while wielding a phallic knife. And Russell shares Hecht’s message: art can be beautiful, but it can also be pretentious and deadly. Work that ideally emanates from the “soul” can become carrion for culture-vultures and fascists (on the left as well as the right).

Unlike Sanine, the actor/dancer in Valentino comes across almost as witless and virginal as the deaf, dumb, and blind boy in Russell's Tommy. When reading about the real Valentino, I think about the star’s vanity and sometimes underwhelming acting, his overcompensating attempts to look “macho,” and Kenneth Anger’s story about Valentino’s giving Ramon Novarro the gift of an "Art Deco dildo." There lurks a darker (in the metaphysical sense), cheekier, and sometimes less likable Valentino than the one Russell presents.

But I also suspect Russell’s purpose is to show that what looks like a “Sheik” is really a passive and alienated chump. Here, our Tinseltown twink is adrift in a world of phonies, creeps from whom he feels estranged whenever he pines for his simpleminded old-world values or when he dreams of cultivating his own orange grove. Various biographies corroborate the image of Valentino as a cipher: a dressmaker’s dummy in silver-screen flesh and a suckling for the kindness and cruelty of domineering women – particularly his benefactor June Mathis (Felicity Kendal), the imperious aesthete Alla Nazimova (Leslie Caron), and his ruthless wife Natacha Rambova (Michelle Phillips).

Casting Rudolf Nureyev in the title role is one of those dicey life-imitating-art gambles that is similar to Nicolas Roeg's casting of David Bowie a year before as the alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth. What would otherwise be lackluster-to-bad acting reinforces a larger point: a story about a man who is only half there. Russell makes this alienation effect even more disconcerting. The dark and exotic Valentino of lore is absent here. Nureyev’s hair is brown, and his skin is almost chalky white. Though he studied several of Valentino’s silent movies and made every effort to duplicate his dance steps and gestures, Nureyev felt himself coming up short, primarily because switching from his heavy Russian accent to a heavy Italian one, and speaking it all in broken English, yielded verbal goulash. But the language problem has a perverse asset. Anyone watching Russell’s final product is likely to conclude that Nureyev’s performance is intended to evoke Pirandello whispering to the audience: “This is Valentino, but it’s not Valentino.” It works better as a famous dancer impersonating a silent actor who was also a dancer: theater of cruelty crossbred with the theater of the absurd.

Throughout the film, Valentino is attacked for being Italian and being a “fairy.” Hollywood -- a bastion of anti-Italian and anti-gay sentiments -- is the true villain of Russell's film. Nureyev believed Valentino to be asexual, and this notion surfaces in a moment that typifies the movie’s fierce dialogue. Just before he gets livid over seeing a nightclub review that depicts him as a “pink powder puff,” Valentino runs into some hussy who brags, “I got the sockets if you got the plugs.” Without missing a beat, he replies: "I envy you, madam. I myself don't seem capable of sustaining even one effort for very long!"

Russell toys with the gay Valentino ideal a little bit but ultimately doesn’t follow through. He makes some allusions early on, when Valentino and Vaslav Nijinsky (Anthony Dowell) dance a handsome tango together to some Argentine song crackling out of a king-size gramophone horn. It’s an indelible image that Russell recalls fondly, claiming he was the one who informed the film’s producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler (who sucker punched the world with Rocky that same year) that Valentino really did teach Nijinksy the dance step that he also helped popularize in the 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
 

Only years later did Russell accept the lavender limelight when writing a glowing review in London’s Sunday Times of David Bret’s 1998 book Valentino: A Dream of Desire, which states that the Sheik was a man’s man in the best sense. As Russell puts it, “From the moment Rudolph Valentino exposed himself in the church at the age of twelve, a legend was born. And it is in this legend that David Bret follows from the cradle to the grave, exposing in the process the greatest closet queen of all time.”

The film’s crowning scene is one that Russell almost lost, due to a squeamish studio. Fortunately, Russell got his way. It involves Valentino spending a night in the slammer after he’s arrested on a bigamy charge (following his Mexican marriage to Rambova). A sadistic prison guard (played by the same guy who played the rapist in Deliverance) is curious and jealous over “the eighth great wonder of the world” Valentino supposedly has between his legs. He forces the star to urinate in his pants while a gaggle of prostitutes, drunks, and a snaggle-toothed masturbator torment him more. As Valentino-the-martyr looks through the bars toward heaven and mumbles some prayers in Italian, June Mathis is in her studio, swooning over rushes of Blood and Sand, as her discovery plays a matador – his anguished face in extreme close-up after the bull's horn guts him. In the cinema, he’s worshipped; in jail, he’s dead meat.

The prison scene is just one, but perhaps the finest, example of why this film is so great and uncompromising. Valentino is an ill-tempered, rude, often violent, and visually stunning gaze into shallow glamor and the dark soul behind what nostalgic flibbertigibbets call “Classic Hollywood.”