Fred Niblo | Blood and Sand / 1922

the dark rebellious part of a normative heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

June Mathis (screenplay, based on the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and the play by Thomas Cushing), Fred Niblo (director) Blood and Sand / 1922

 

A year after his subdued appearance in Camille, director Fred Niblo and writer June Mathis were able to cook up another Vicente Blasco Ibáñez fiction that featured Valentino’s face and body, which, in sync with his own vision of himself, portrayed a man caught up in a relationship with an exotic and difficult woman—in the form of Natacha Rambova—when all he truly wanted, as he later described, was an old-fashioned Italian housewife.

     As the Spanish bullfighter Juan Gallardo, Valentino could have both and fight out his inner forces in full view of his adoring audiences. Certainly Niblo, who’d already contributed significantly to the career of to the matinee idol who stood as a mirror opposite to this new fluid and fragile dancer, Douglas Fairbanks who moved in angular leaps and bounds that seemed to test the limits his virile body. Niblo had filmed him in both The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Three Musketeers, and accordingly knew quite well how to show off the male body of his leading men—in Ben Hur he would later do the same for Valentino’s replacement Roman Novarro—to his female fans.

      He first treats Valentino as a somewhat shy young man, dodging the bull, only to come out from behind the wooden barrier with a smile on his face that is so engaging it is nearly impossible  to resist the young boy who dreams of being a matador. When the bull soon after kills his friend, his revenge seems almost justified as he slaughters the poor beast, the bandit Plumitas (Walter Long) looking on approvingly from afar. And his kiss of goodbye to his friend intimates of the closed male world into which he soon enters, escaping only occasionally to make dutiful love to his wife, the gentle Carmen (Lila Lee) before leaving her basically alone to raise his sons, while his later mistress, the evil and calculating Doña Sol, drains him of his masculinity which ultimately leads to his death.

       Early in the story, when the young Gallardo begins to draw attention to himself for his bullfighting exploits, he and his friends visit a bar where a dancer lures him into to performing with her. As in the tango of Four Horsemen Valentino as Gallardo displays his dancing skill, enchanting both the bar’s other patrons and his own posse of males, Don José his manager (Fred Becker), the ex-matador El Nacional (George Field), the picador Potaje (Jack Winn), and Ponteliro (Harry Lamont) who travel with him. 

      But when the woman demands a kiss, his tosses her aside, insisting that he hates all women, except of course his wife, making it clear that women have meaning for him only in how they adorate and represent him; they have little role in his world as beings who make demands upon him.

 

     Perceiving this, Doña Sol arranges to meet Gallardo not as the femme fatale that she truly is, but rather as an admiring fan, a seeming sycophant who waits until he accepts her invitation for a visit to her house to entrap him in her beauty a bit like a human Dionaea, the Venus Flytrap.

       Niblo and Mathis spell out her exotic evil immediately before he arrives to her house, showing her lounging on a couch smoking so heavily that one might almost imagine her puffing on a hookah while being accompanied on the lute by her exotic-looking servant, who appears somewhat like a mix of character out of the East Indian legends and The Arabian Tales.

      Indeed, for the first half of his visit, Gallardo seems more interested in the servant, whose eyes meet his in a seeming engagement of sexual enchantment on both their parts. Obviously, Valentino’s character, somewhat taken aback by the exoticism of the figure, is fascinated by him just for his difference. But one senses that this sexually ambivalent creature is also of some interest to the bullfighter as well, a figure, who as a male belongs to his world, but who yet openly displays feminine qualities which satisfy the sexual requirements of Gallardo’s macho sensibility.

       It is only when his manager leaves him alone with the female beauty, who has already symbolically “engaged” him with the gift of her Cleopatra-like ring, that she lures him further into her private harem, knowing precisely how to play to his ego and heterosexual values. She is everything that Carmen is not, the dark rebellious part of his normative heart, despite the irony of her “sunny” name, that once again mirrors the opposite of the traditional relationship he has with his wife.

    If his vocation, despite the sunlit spectacle of the handsome pigtailed and spangled costumed matador, concerns death, so too does she make certain that he recognizes in her power over him that there is danger involved. Gallardo can no more resist her allure than he can escape the glare, snort, and pounding hooves of the bull.

     He tries desperately to escape the vortex in which she has pushed him, and there is a beautiful moment as his closest comrade, El Nacional all but makes love to him, putting his hand over the matador’s hand, with his friend doing the same, before he positions his arm around his shoulder and brings his face next to Gallardo’s in an attempt to attract back him into the masculine love which might save him from the evil enchantment. It almost works, as Gallardo agrees to escape Madrid to his country home Rinconada.

      Despite his best intentions, Doña Sol shows up with a stalled automobile just to demonstrate, more to herself than him, the power she still has over his behavior.

      In the house where she demands to be put up for the night until her car is repaired, she usurps the absent Carmen’s own bed, demanding breakfast with the bandit who has also intruded upon Gallardo’s hopeful silence.

       And finally, upon hearing of Doña Sol’s visitation Carmen and her mother visit finding the intruder still in the house. Her bedroom competitor intentionally drops her purse so that she can command her now totally subservient lover to pick it up, a demonstration to his wife of her superior powers.

        Indeed, by now Gallardo is so psychologically and physically diminished that he purposely takes chances in the ring and behaves in a manner that foretells his certain death. It his Carmen alone who can now reclaim his love if not his life.

       Throughout the work, Valentino appears both in and out of costume, with his long hair and pigtail, as a stunningly gorgeous hunk of a man as no other screen actor to date had ever before appeared. Yes, he is still at moments thin and fragile, perhaps too smooth in his graceful gestures and dancing for US male heterosexual tastes. But, at moments, his slightly effeminate body might almost remind one of Marlon Brando, particularly in the scene where, behind a dressing screen, he is having his feet wrapped by male attendants. Just as in the first scene, when he peeks out from the wooden protective barrier, leaning back into the room to take full delight in his colleagues’ comparison with him to a Roman gladiator, as if were about to lecture on the Napoleonic Code.

        Finally, in this film Valentino comes truly alive as the pretty boy he truly was.

       What Mathis, Acker, Rambova and other female supporters made of this obviously tortured bisexual boy gone who quickly became a Hollywood sensation is not clear; but what we now know is that it was women, particularly lesbian women, who made Valentino into the film legend he has ultimately became.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).