Ken Russell | Valentino / 1977

an orange just out of reach

Ken Russell and Mardik Martin (screenplay, based on Valentino, an Intimate Exposé of the Sheik by Chaw Mank and Brad Steifer), Ken Russell (director) Valentino / 1977

 

The director who never missed the opportunity to take his motion pictures quite literally “into hysteria” and who didn’t mind exaggerating or making up history to get them there tried terribly hard to whip up vague rumors and banal facts in Valentino, but this time, alas, without success. As Janet Maslin puts it in her The New York Times review:

“Valentino is Mr. Russell's least disturbing movie since The Boy Friend: That should come as a relief to his distractors and as a slight disappointment to those who respect and appreciate his abrasive energy. To a large extent, the film's relative ordinariness is attributable to Valentino's. For all of his glamour, he was a bland figure, more of a star than he was an actor, and Mr. Russell's best films have been about artists, such as Henri Gaudier Brzeska in Savage Messiah and Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers, whose lives were governed by their unruly talent. Valentino's greatest dream was to leave Hollywood and became an orange grower, so there isn't room for the grandiose ambition that animated Tommy.”

    That doesn’t mean that Russell doesn’t try his best to boil the pot by presenting ancillary figures such as Vaslav Nijinsky (performed by Royal Ballet dancer Anthony Dowell) who together with Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) make a wonderful dancing duo as they tango across the floor before Nijinsky breaks off into breath-taking double reverse spins and pirouettes which is all meant to hint that Rudy had special rapport with the men.

    But females clearly are the forces who control Valentino’s life, as he is fed not by his special dance lessons to the likes of Nijinsky, but by his taxi dancer chauffeuring of elderly women who drop by Billie Streeter’s (Linda Thorson) club to dance off with the Italian beauty. One of his customers is the Chilean socialite Bianca de Saulles, wife of wealthy football player and business man John de Saulles (Robin Clarke), who here is represented as a mobster who’s currently seeing Valentino’s boss and latter dancing partner, Streeter (in real life suffragist and creator of the “Joan Walt,” “The Joan Sawyer Maxixe,” and the “Aeroplane Waltz,” Joan Sawyer).

       Although the movie hints that Valentino and de Saulles may be having an affair, it also implies that nothing truly happens between the dancer and the mobster’s wife except for his boiling up a good bowl of al dente spaghetti and paying loving attention to her young boy before testifying, after Bianca shoots her husband dead, about Streeter and Jack de Saulles’ affair. In short, the movie tries to have it both ways, centering the story upon the strong women who ruled his life, while at the same time suggesting Valentino seldom engaged in heterosexual sex and didn’t consummate his relationships with either of his wives. He seldom gets a chance after the Nijinsky hookup to be in the same room with another man.

     Like Nijinsky, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is thrown in just so that the film can call up the name of another scandalous star and that Valentino can get a chance to meet “Mr. Fatty’s” girlfriend for the evening, Jean Acker (Carol Kane), in reality a lesbian who was also one of Nazimova’s lovers, but in this case is simply shop girl turned movie star overnight, impressing Rudy enough by her lavish lifestyle—mocked in this film by her ordering up a huge bowl of French fries topped with ketchup—to encourage him to give up dancing for the movies so that he can buy his dreamed of orange grove and help out his dying mother. Although the director and writer wash over the fact of Acker’s bi-sexuality, they use of the occasion to toss in the first of many pink powder puffs that will mock the hero to his grave by mentioning that she has locked him out of their apartment on their wedding night—the truth evidently.

   Since Valentino’s women are the Scheherazades of this tale, Russell trots in Alla Nazimova (Leslie Caron) for a queenly lesbian-drag visit to Rudy’s funeral accompanied by a whole bevy of sapphic beauties in which she rhapsodizes over her memories of him in her film Camille. It was, in fact, that film as I argue above, and her designer Rambova’s handling of him in Monsier Beaucaire that actually helped to cultivate the “pink puff” myth and to ruin the career that another of the storytellers—the only human being outside of Valentino’s later manager George Melford (Don Fellows), screenwriter June Mathis (Felicity Kendal), who may have also loved Valentino but used him more as an ordinary lunch ticket instead of way to bring attention to herself.

       It was Mathis, as I note elsewhere, who gave Valentino his first chance to act in The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, developing the figure of the exotic lover that would make The Sheik and Blood and Sand his best films. And it is she who bails him out of the jail cell where he lands up for trying to marry Natacha Rambova before his divorce from Acker had taken the required cooling off period of one year. Locked up on their wedding night in a California jail cell, this marriage also wasn’t consummated in the usual manner.. I’ll come back to the jail in which he and Rambova were locked up in a moment.

 

    For we cannot ignore the entry into this funerary travesty of Natacha Rambova (Michelle Phillips), Nazimova’s favorite lover and the greatest fraud of the film—at least as the way Russell tells it. She enters to retell of her great love of Valentino, which seems to have consisted mostly of throwing bones to tell a future that was meant to allow her to manipulate the actor into helping make her the director, designer, and the star of his movies; but she goes home with Nazimova. Convincing the dumb yokel that he could express himself only through poetry based on Omar Khayyam and live a spiritual world which she alone inhabited, she convinced him to turn down any role that he might have been able to logically inhabit, taking him off into her notion of an effete world of artfilm that that neither she nor Nazimova had yet been fully able to create.

     Russell manages to visualize a wonderful metaphor for their “spiritualized” sexuality by pulling them into a desert tent that the Sheik was meant to inhabit, and showing off both his star’s sexual treasures, Phillips stripping naked with Nureyev following her lead to create a fabulous photo shoot where we even get a brief glimpse of the Russian Rudy’s jewels and Phillips tits, without any sex involved, Phillips dressing and running off the minute Valentino was ready for at least a stab at sexual intercourse.

    Maybe if the poor boy had had some more males like Nijinsky thrown his way, he might at least have been a little less tense. But the men of Russell’s film are all brutal, conniving beasts like Hollywood directors and producers Rex Ingram, Jesse Lasky (Huntz Hall), and Sidney Olcott (John Justin), the xenophobic and homophobic Navy boxer Rory O’Neill (Peter Vaughn), and a gang of cynical newsmen straight out of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page.

       These jackals, in fact, are even worse than the overwrought nightmare scene in the prison where Valentino is kept—without bail money from Lasky or any other of the figures who’d grown wealthy off him—to be sexually harassed and taunted by a hot and sweaty homo-hating prison guard and a toothless masturbating fellow prisoner who with others corner the actor forcing him without latrine privileges to piss in his own pants. Truly, it’s not that much different from what his directors and producers did to him every day. If Valentino was a pansy, he never even had an opportunity to explore it.

      Instead, the macho Italian stupidly fought a stand-in for the over-the-hill reporter who had created the “pink powder puff” story. He won the bout, but as I note above lost his life to gastric ulcers resulting in sepsis aggravated surely by the bout and his celebratory drinking spree. He died in a hospital not alone in his mansion as this movie suggests, but I’ll give Russell credit for his last gasp of dramatic overkill. And, as Maslin observes, the ridiculous dance-a-thon-boxing match shows the Russian Rudy is at his best:

    

“He is at his most stunning as he tangoes in a dimly lit nightclub of the film, and fighting for his life in a noisy, crowded area one wall of which hangs a tattered American flag.”

     Nureyev is beautiful to watch since his every movement is an act of grace. But the lines Russell and Mardik Martin give him and all the others to speak were created in Palookaland. This film is not even the usual chlorinated biopic, but a reeking halfway house between homage and a desperate search for any gossipy stink. When all quiets down and the women and brutes leave, however, we realize there is not even a sniff of perfume or talcum powder to be found here, but only the smell of an orange just out of reach, ripening in the sun.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).