A Harem Knight

The films in which Turpin plays the character Rodney St. Clair are curious because there seems no consistency whatsoever to the character. Something of an innocent abroad he had by this time morphed into an elegant playboy - international love-pirate and notorious stealer of other men's wives. This continues a fascination with parodying the voyeuristic style of Von Stroheim which began in the 1924 film Three Foolish Weeks, a combined parody of Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1921) and Alan Crosland's film version of Elinor Glyn's celebrated but utterly ridiculous steamy novel of casual sex, Three Weeks (1914). Here Ben lays Baron Sergius Rodney St. Clair (the name Sergius taken from that of the Stroheim character in Foolish Wives). He would again very explicitly parody Stroheim as Baron Bonamo in The Pride of Pikeville (1927). In between comes this Rodney St. Clair film, where he is seemingly the same chaarcter (he has a portrait of himself in the Stroheim get-up) and which actually works rather well, with Madeline Hurlock very good as the harem escapee playing off playboy Ben Turpin against her real lover, the "unknown aviator".

Although it does not appear to be parody of any particular film, it successfully combines tropes familiar from many US sex-fantasy films of the twenties (including a reverse version of the kiss that causes the recipient to faint from the same year's John Barrymore effort The Sea Beast (a version of Moby Dick that is definitely more dick than moby). All in all this Turpin captures captures quite accurately the essentially puerile, voyeuristic appeal of such films. Stroheim was a genius in a class of his own but the majority of the sub-Valentino output (and much of the Valentino output itself) was simply laughable. Parodies abound at this period precisely because of the maladroitness of US attempts to produce films with "adult" films on the European model. Valentino was barely cold in his grave before The Sheik caused unintended mirth amongst its audiences.