Cecil B. DeMille is often credited with shooting the first feature-length film (The Squaw Man) in Hollywood in 1914. Thanks to DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, John Ford and other names now familiar only to cinephiles, movies (and scandals!) became a fixture in American life by the 1920s, and low-rent nickelodeons gave way to movie palaces. Given the right role, an obscure actor could become a matinee idol overnight. There is no better example than Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, a 1921 feature.
Valentino and The Sheik never totally faded from pop culture. More than a half-century after his death, his image was familiar enough that Gene Wilder spoofed it in The World’s Greatest Lover (1977).
When film societies and cinematheques bring back classic silent features, however, The Sheik is rarely among them. Yet Valentino and The Sheik definitely went viral in 1921. How did it happen? As the French used to say (at least before Simone de Beauvoir), “Cherchez la femme!” More specifically, distaff moviegoers.
Going viral may be a neologism but it is not a new phenomenon. Of course, through most of human history it involved word of mouth, whether kaffeeklatsch chatter, gossip over the backyard fence, or barroom banter. In fact, the term was more apt then than now, as it described a situation in which news, like a virus, was passed from person to person, not through media.
Then came the printing press and it was time to “start spreading the news” as Frank Sinatra would have put it. Printing presses brought us newspapers and magazines; moving pictures both documented reality and fostered illusion. In an early example of cross-pollination in media, fan magazines created buzz (though I don’t believe that term was in use 100 years ago) about movies and the people who made them, while the movies boosted the sale of the magazines. In 1921 there was a lot of buzz about The Sheik and its star, Rudolph Valentino. For the most part, it was a female hive phenomenon.
Viewing The Sheik today, one might find it difficult to see what all the fuss was about. It doesn’t seem much more than escapism for plain Janes. Even by the standards of the day, the film isn’t particularly well written or directed, and a lot of it seems overly melodramaic. Nevertheless, there are elements of it that resonate within the manosphere today.
One reason the film is seldom shown today could be its attitude towards Arabs. Frankly, I would not want to be the manager of a theater that screens a film with a title card that describes the setting as, “Where the children of Araby dwell in happy ignorance that civilization has passed them by.” That’s like asking for a suicide bomber to target your movie theater. Middle Eastern studies aside, the Sahara Desert is the setting for a plot right out of Romance Novel Writing 101. In fact, the film was based on a popular 1919 novel by Edith Maude Hull. While the story may seem corny today, it must be remembered that romance novels were not a genre in those days. When The Sheik was published, it was not relegated to the romance aisle, it was mainstream fiction.
The heroine is Lady Diana Mayo, an emancipated, independent young Englishwoman with bobbed hair and a headstrong attitude. Refusing a marriage proposal early in the film, she asserts “Marriage is captivity – the end of independence.” In other words, she don’t need no man. Of course, if that were really true, we would have no story. Even if you’re not a fan of romance novels, you might surmise that an alpha male is exactly what she needs. She just hasn’t met him – yet! This trope goes back at least as far as The Taming of the Shrew.
The narrative starts at the Algerian town of Biskra. Described as “the Monte Carlo of the Sahara,” it appears to be something of a resort for well-to-do Europeans. For some reason, Lady Diana decides to join a caravan into the desert. A white woman on a long trek with Muslim men in the middle of the Sahara desert? What could go wrong? Well, no one ever said an independent streak and intelligence went hand in hand.
Enter the dashing Ahmed Ben Hassan (Valentino), a sheik who has been educated in Paris. Is he a gentleman or a brute? Having already met Lady Mayo in Biskra, he has found her intriguing and decides to abduct her from the caravan. His philosophy is “When an Arab sees a woman that he wants, he takes her.”
She rebels against his authority, but he decides to show her who’s boss. According to the title cards:
“I am not accustomed to having my orders disobeyed,” he states.
“And I am not accustomed to obeying orders,” she responds.
“You will learn,” he replies.
Indeed she does! According to another title card, “A week of sullen obedience” ensues. The viewer can’t help but notice that she has traded in her mannish English getup (pith helmet, khakis and riding crop) for the colorful (presumably…after all, this is a black and white movie) garb of an Arab woman. Is she in the early stages of Stockholm syndrome?
Unfortunately, the Sheik is not her only admirer. Another is Omair, the leader of a bandit tribe who spirits her away from the sheik. Her youthful beauty and, frankly, her whiteness make her attractive to both men. So we have another ancient trope, namely Helen of Troy, with Lady Mayo as the face that launched a thousand Arabs on horseback.
Predictably, Ahmed Ben Hassan kills Omair but is seriously wounded in the scuffle. While recovering, he reflects on his relationship with Lady Diana. Having initially had the hots for her, he realizes she is more than a fling, that he is truly in love with her. Cue the happy ending.
Actually, the ending is even happier than one might suspect. Miscegenation might have been a thorny issue in 1921, and one can imagine that it might cut into box office returns, not just in the South but in the North, as the nationwide reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s would indicate. No need to worry, however; it turns out that Ahmed is not really an Arab. You see, he is really a European whose parents (English father, Spanish mother) died while the family was in Algeria, and he was rescued and adopted by a sheik. After his adoptive father died, Ahmed took over leadership of the tribe. So he is a sheik but he is not an Arab. It’s not quite bait and switch, however. After all the film is called The Sheik, not The Arab.
Like any movie, The Sheik has a host of people in front of and behind the camera, most of whom have faded from the public eye (one notable exception is Adolphe Menjou, whose acting career stretched from 1914 to 1960). The one indispensable presence, the only reason to see the film today, is the star, Rudolph Valentino (thankfully shortened from Rodolfo Pietro Filibertro Raffaello Guiglielmi di Valentina d’ Antonguella). If you’re going to be a heartthrob, it probably doesn’t hurt to have a name that evokes Valentine’s Day.
Born in Italy in 1895, Valentino was something of a mama’s boy. His father was disappointed in him and eventually so was his mother, who advanced him money to emigrate to the United States in 1913. He had no particular trade or profession and lacking English language skills, he initially obtained only menial work in New York.
But he was young and handsome, had a foreign accent and bedroom eyes – and he could bust a move. So he found his services as a male taxi-dancer in demand. Eventually, he took his dance moves to a traveling musical troupe. When the troupe reached California, he decided to get into the movies, starting out as a $5/day extra.
Soon people behind the camera began to take note of him. Eventually, he came to the attention of June Mathis, a highly paid screenwriter and studio executive. At a time when leading men were WASPy, he had a different image, which resulted in his status as Hollywood’s first Latin Lover. Or rather, he was a new breed of Latin lover. The old breed were aficionados of a dead language.
Though Valentino had never played a lead role, Mathis thought he was perfect for the role of Julio Desnoyers in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a scenario she had fashioned from Vicente Blasco Ibañez’s worldwide best-selling 1916 novel about an Argentinian family’s involvement in World War I. Valentino’s dancing skills served him well in the tango scene, and publicity stills of him sporting his dashing gaucho duds are still easy to find on the internet.
The film was a smash hit, sitting atop the 1921 box office champs with an astounding gross of $9,200,000 and selling 131,428,571 tickets – far ahead of the No. 2 film, Chaplin’s The Kid with a $2,500,000 gross and 35,714,285 tickets sold.
Later that year Valentino was cast in the title role in The Sheik. It not only became his signature role, it had ramifications in pop culture. A ladies’ man was known as a sheik. Sheik condoms featured a silhouette of Valentino on the package and asked the question, “What does a woman want?”
Valentinomania (my term, not one that was in use at the time) was described by John Dos Passos in “The Big Money” the third section of his famous U.S.A. trilogy:
The streets were jumbled with hysterical faces, waving hands, crazy eyes; they stuck out their autographbooks, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his admirablytailored dress-suit; they stole his hat and pulled at his necktie; his valets removed young women from under his bed; all night in nightclubs and cabarets actresses leching for stardom made sheepseyes at him under their mascared lashes.
After more leading roles (notably Blood and Sand in 1922, Monsieur Beaucaire in 1924, The Eagle in 1925), he returned to the desert in Son of the Sheik, a 1926 potboiler. After five years he had come full circle. At the same time, he had come to the end of the line. 31 years old, he died of peritonitis later that year.
Dying young, of course, is always a good way to become a legend in Hollywood (also in sports and politics, among other endeavors) as it evokes endless speculation about what might have been. In Valentino’s case, it is particularly interesting because his demise came just before the coming of talkies in 1927. Would he have survived the transition, or would his voice not have matched his image? Or would it have been too heavily accented for movie audiences to understand? Silent movies added an air of mystery to every actor, as the sound of one’s voice, a key component of one’s identity in person, was absent. Many silent film stars discovered their careers had been silenced after the talkies revealed their voices.
One of the ironic aspects of the silent cinema was its international appeal at a time when provincialism was prominent. Title cards could be easily translated into the language of any country where a movie was distributed. A European actor in a Hollywood movie could play any role, as could an American actor in a European movie. Valentino was an exception, as his “foreignness” added to his appeal in the United States. In a sense, he went against the prevailing mood of the country. The Sheik was released in 1921 when Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted, so it was not a particularly good time to be an Italian immigrant. Valentino actually died before they did. Thanks to appeals and protests, they were not executed till 1927.
The funeral of Valentino was an even bigger event than the release of one of his movies. 80,000+ mourners lined up in the August heat to pay their last respects as he lay in state in a bronze coffin at a New York funeral home. Reportedly, some of his fans could not attend since they had committed suicide after hearing of his demise.
Naturally, conspiracy theories abounded. It wasn’t peritonitis that got him, it was this, that, or something else. Of course, histrionics were much in evidence among the mourners. Dos Passos wrote of his funeral:
All the ambulances in that part of the city were busy carting off women who’d fainted….every few minutes a girl fainted in front of the bier and was revived by the newspapermen who put down her name and address and claims to notice in the public prints.
Since women had first voted in a Presidential election in 1920, it is not hard to imagine a number of men rolling their eyes at such behavior and saying, “What’d I tell ya?” Second thoughts about that 19th Amendment, anyone?
While femme moviegoers wet their panties over Valentino (H.L. Mencken said he was “catnip” to women), men were nonplussed, to put it mildly. Many considered him an effeminate dandy, if not downright queer (he was a close friend of Ramon Novarro, another Latin lover movie star, who was a known homosexual).
In the 1920s, far more men worked on farms or in factories and mines than today, so getting one’s hands dirty was a reality for millions of men. At the same time, the era is often thought of as the time when advertising and consumer culture were born. Men were offered more grooming products than ever before. It was a time of transition from doing manly things to buying manly products. Today Valentino might have been what we call a metrosexual. His true sexual proclivities, however, are as ambiguous as the allegations about them.
Valentino’s appeal was to something deep in the female psyche. The male ego daydream involves lording it over everyone, male and female; the female ego also wants to lord it over everyone, male and female, but secretly longs for an alpha male who will lord it over her. Thanks to the Valentino craze, American women became disappointed in their husbands, not realizing that seduction and marriage are two different things. The first is emotional, the second is transactional. If women found their husbands wanting emotionally, they never stopped to think that they might have found Valentino wanting as a husband. In fact, his relationships with the opposite sex are revealing…but exactly what they reveal is open to debate.
Valentino was a man of the old world, so it is not surprising that he is on record as preferring traditional, old-fashioned, home-centered women. Yet the women he married were anything but. His career depended not only on women in the movie audience, it depended on women in the movie industry. While the aforementioned June Mathis was a heterosexual, that does not appear to be the case with his other female influencers. Reportedly, he allowed them to make his major career decisions.
Valentino’s first wife, actress Jean Acker, was a bisexual. In fact, the marriage was never consummated. She was linked with Alla Nazimova, a silent movie star.
Wife No. 2 was Natacha Rambova (her real name was Winifred Shaughnessy, and she was born into a Mormon family in Utah), a costume designer. A close friend of the aforementioned Nazimova, she was also suspected of being bisexual. Since Valentino married her before his first divorce was final, he was arrested for bigamy, as juicy a scandal as any tabloid could ever hope for.
At the time of Valentino’s death, he was supposedly engaged to actress Pola Negri, who described him as the “love of her life.” As proof, she fainted several times at his funeral. She also was rumored to be bisexual.
It is more than ironic that a man who made so many straight women swoon was surrounded by female control freaks who were allegedly switch-hitters. Given the millions of heterosexual women who got hot and bothered by Valentino, it is hard to believe he couldn’t form a relationship with one. Were his wives mere beards in a “lavender marriage,” i.e., a homosexual marriage of convenience to keep up appearances? Or he was just content to let girlbosses run his life? During his brief career he earned $5,000,000, yet he was in debt at the time of his death. Did his female advisers also offer economic advice?
Of course, there is the possibility Valentino was ahead of his time. Today a movie star of ambiguous sexuality with a bisexual significant other would hardly be headline news. In fact, he would probably be the Grand Marshal of the WeHo (West Hollywood) Pride Parade.
Today you can watch The Sheik for free on YouTube. The run time is only 80 minutes so it’s not a huge investment of your time. While the film is certainly a far cry from the movies you see at your local multiplex today, it is an interesting take on the theme of gynocentrism. The film is all about what the woman wants; the man’s value lies in how well he can satisfy the woman’s wants – not just materially but emotionally. Though the man and woman are initially at loggerheads, he comes around to what she wants him to be.
As popular as The Sheik and Valentino were, it’s good to remind oneself that it’s only a movie…only a movie…only a movie. Yet in 1921 women compared real men to a phantom paragon and found them wanting.
Today the female conception of the ideal man isn’t what it was a century ago, but the female sense of entitlement vis-à-vis the man of their dreams hasn’t changed. Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Actually, some things do change. Today you have many options in the family planning section of your local pharmacy, but Sheik condoms are no longer one of them.
