Rudy II as Rudy I in a Gaudy Bust

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

VALENTINO. Directed by Ken Russell. Screenplay by Russell and Martin

Rudolph Valentino was among the most put-upon of movie stars. Forced to live in--and with--a screen persona that could not have been at wider variance from his true spirit; bearing the crushing load of fame in an era unfamiliar with violations of privacy; bewildered by two absurd marriages and harassed by studio bosses intent on protecting their "property" at the expense of the man, he provides the stuff of primal screen drama.

Alas, poor Rudy: his bad luck with producers and directors extends 50 years beyond the grave. For his life has now fallen into the feverish--not to say hysterical--hands of Ken Russell, a director whose singular style and energy once promised excitement, but which now promise nothing but outrage.

In the present instance, he and Co-Writer Mardik Martin show no more interest in exploring the real film star than did the early moguls. As usual, Russell hammers one over the head with gaudy and excessive cliches of a bygone era's decor. They have a certain visual excitement, but they say more about his own feverish temperament than about the spirit of the age. The use of Rudolf Nureyev for Rudolph Valentino was canny in conception--both men display an animal magnetism that audiences have found irresistible. But Rudy I had a very different appeal from Rudy II; the Valentino swagger was manifestly a device to hide his vulnerability and naivete. Nureyev is an athlete, a sophisticated stage performer bewildered only by the demands of the camera, of the English language and of the director. Russell, who might have used Valentino's short, unhappy life as a device for social and dramatic purposes ends by distorting the man and the epoch. What emerges beneath the dazzling exteriors is a subtext of Russell's idiosyncratic personal peeves. His movie is perhaps understandably anti-journalist and anti-mogul, since both have lately been unkind to Russell. But the representatives of these groups are seen to be so preposterously venal, so unredeemably evil, that one half expects to see them appear twirling mustaches and ready to tie Valentino to the nearest railroad tracks.

These vaudeville archetypes are only the beginning of a list of targets. As Russell represents them, all heterosexual males are unfeeling brutes, all females, such as Starlet Carol Kane, are predatory beasts out to cripple the male in that region where it will hurt most. Overall, he spreads a relentless anti-Americanism, implying that the unfortunate inhabitants of these shores are the only citizens of the world capable of materialism or vulgarity.

This leaves only one species for whom Russell can produce a kind word--and we are to understand that homosexuality is the sole source of Valentino's saintly patience and stoic courage. To illustrate this, the director concocts a sequence in which the star challenges one of his macho journalistic tormentors to a boxing match, takes a vicious beating but finally kayoes the nasty man, in the style of a gay Rocky.

Even so, the movie is likely to garner attention -- largely because it delves so deeply into the Hollywood Babylon. Scandal animates every scene, and, according to the standards of the time, over heated melodrama becomes the order of the day. Pop Singer Michelle Phillips, for example, plays Natacha Rambova, Valentino's culturally aspiring second wife, as if she were trying out for a school play that unaccountably contains a nude love scene.

In the Charleston and ballroom-dancing sequences, Nureyev shows the audience what might have been: an erotic figure far more alive than the glittery props and people who surrounded him. But the actor's incapacities are in fact enlarged, rather than disguised, by Director Russell. The major movie that might have been is swallowed by the pretensions of a director who, like his villains, murders what he claims to dissect. -- Richard Schickel

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