The Legend Of Rudolph Valentino

The passion...The Mystique...The true story of the silver screen's greatest lover!

Rudolph Valentino was the first male sexual icon of the modern media world.For five years, from 1921 until 1926, other men watched with envy as Valentino, the quintessential Latin screen lover, made legions of women swoon over the mere thought of his gaze and his embrace.This documentary covers the career of Valentino from his youth as a failed military academy student to his arrival in Hollywood in 1917 and his emergence in 1921 as American cinema's first great lover.The remaining five years of his life are represented by his work in screen classics from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik, including outtakes from his films.

The Valentino phenomenon concluded with events that still resonate at the other end of the century - Valentino died from peritonitis, resulting from a perforated ulcer, in a New York hospital on August 23, 1926.Tens of thousands of women lined the streets during the funeral, and a cult of fans, forming clubs scattered throughout the country, revived his memory regularly for decades, eerie precursors to the outpouring of grief and obsessive adoration surrounding the likes of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Jim Morrison.-Bruce Eder