Valentino

In Australia in 1977 we were in the boom years and love affair with colour TV. Most cinema releases movies at the box office dropped dead.. and most were very good... or at least interesting.... VALENTINO was one of them. A wildly ambitious and quite well imagined 1920s fiction on Valentino's career and loves, this Ken Russell pic has spectacular imagery and hilarious casting (Huntz Hall as the head of Paramount) but as usual in a Russell film was seriously derailed by grotesque sexual moments. The film has a great sense of time and place and with great female casting, spectacular dance scenes and breathtaking art direction VALENTNO gives the viewer 2 hours of lavish early 20s Hollywood life. Any film with both Carol Kane and Leslie Caron with Nureyev must be seen to be believed anyway. Some cinemas of the time (well, mine anyway) ran it as a double feature with NEW YORK NEW YORK and found the same audience enjoyed both... even if they needed a meal break and a walk around the block to get through this 5 hour musical fruit salad. In the same week we also ran THE WORLD'S GREATEST LOVER which, also with Carol Kane and equally gorgeous 20s visuals missed its mark because of the insufferable antics of Gene Wilder over-eating the whole production. Yes, over-eating. Nobody survived.

Ken Russell could certainly do a period picture. Detail, feel, mood, elegance and style, you name it. In his depiction of 1920's Italian heart throb Hollywood star, Rudolph Valentino, all these key aspects are in place.

Lacking some of the more outrageous flourishes of sexual and violent depravities that marred/enabled (depending on your point of view) many other of Russell's flicks, this is still certificate 18 with some moderately explicit nudity.

The locations are inspired (the desert filming scene is superbly done), such as the Russell Coates Museum in Bournemouth and the dancing and set pieces dazzling and amazing. However, somehow the film doesn't gel as a whole and working out why is near impossible.

Some say that the casting of the Russian ballet icon, Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino to be a major fault, but I disagree. Sure, he's stilted and with the wrong accent, but he absolutely looks the part and with that immensely athletic body of his, well....and the dancing is as you'd expect. As the dashing sheik in the desert, just mentioned, he looks uncannily like the real thing.

Maybe that the film covers a lot of ground and at a full 2 hours, there's a lot of visual information. Sometimes it feels that there isn't the narrative clarity to support all that and we don't always know what is going on. Or, at least I didn't.

The late, great Ken has produced a fine film but one that ultimately doesn't quite work.

Filled with wonderful moments, Valentino, ultimately collapses under the weight of its overblown and raucous fairground antics. It must have been an amazing coup to get Rudolf Nureyev to play the infamous Rudolph Valentino but there is just too much going on and some scenes going on for too long. The costumes, by the director's then wife Shirley are amazing but really only help to feed in to the overall campiness of the proceedings. I can imagine Ken bouncing about encouraging everyone to give it their all and this certainly seems to have born fruit with Peter Vaughan's ecstatic performance towards the end but it also means that poor little Felicity Kendal, always the most measured of actresses, actually overacts here. A camp extravaganza that I'm sure many can enjoy but I would have preferred just a little more insight. The Fatty Arbuckle portrayal is unforgivable, never mind that of Valentino himself.

While I'm not a Ken Russell expert or afficionado, I have come to expect certain things when viewing one of his films. One is the almost obsessive attention to period detail, which is refreshing in this day and age. I mean, when Carol Kane comes out with a soup tureen full of french fries and a bottle of ketchup, you can bet your Aunt Myrtle's girdle that that bottle is period correct for the 1920s. Another thing is that Russell usually drops some sort of fever dream-styled scene into the proceedings that usually results in a form of tonal whiplash from the rest of the movie. This happens with the jail scene of Valentino and his wife. Sweet Mary, I almost had flashbacks to the torture scenes in THE DEVILS with that one. Russel definitely marches to his own beat; if the mythology behind Valentino doesn't suit his purposes, Russell simply barges ahead and creates his own. Valentino historians and fans (are there any still living?) may take issue with accuracy and sequence, but Rudolf Valentino is no sacred icon to me, so the film is a nice palate cleanser from all the corporate, comic book sausage product we've been fed of late. It's nice to see this ragtag bunch of players, from Nureyev and Mama Michelle to Leslie Caron and Carol Kane to players like John Ratzenberger in an early role. Part fever dream, part movie mag ballyhoo, the film drags during its middle/third act, but ultimately goes down easy . . . Well, as easy as a Ken Russell movie can.

Who knows if any of this is true, but director Ken Russell's take on the life of Rudolph Valentino is a lot of fun. Opening at Valentino's infamously raucous funeral, the film is told in flashbacks by various people who knew him. That's where any similarity to CITIZEN KANE ends. Russell is a master of opulence and it's clear that no money was spared. The sets and costumes are spectacular, but they're nearly overshadowed by Russell's casting choices. Michelle Phillips plays Valentino's wife Natasha, Leslie Caron is the great Nazimova and one time Dead End kid Huntz Hall is Paramount chief Jesse Lasky. Bizarre casting to be sure, but all three are surprisingly good. Caron in particular seems to be having a really good time. In hindsight, the casting of Rudolf Nureyev as the world's "greatest lover" seems ironic, but he isn't bad. It is too bad he has to speak. There are times he's incomprehensible. The direction is fairly straightforward, although Caron's funeral scene entrance and Valentino's jail house encounter are vintage Russell --- they're nearly operatic. Carol Kane and Seymour Cassel are in it too.