Love Is a Language Season: The Eagle (Dir Clarence Brown, 1h12m, 1925)

With it being February, with Valentines Day fast approaching, we turn once more to romance; and what better place to start than with one of early cinema's greatest heart-throbs? From cinema's birth, with figures like Harold Lockwood and Wallace Reid, to their heyday in the 50s, where Marlon Brando and James Dean adding danger to the archetype, to Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze, so the heartthrob has evolved along with the medium, creating icons in the process. Above them all, though, is the iconic figure of Rudolph Valentino, the original, and archetypal, cinematic heartthrob. Whilst lesser critics would focus upon his most famous film, The Sheikh, in which his exoticism and allure is on full display, it is to The Eagle that we turn today, with Valentino's Russian solider turning outlaw to strike revenge against a landowner, only to fall for his daughter.

Emigrating to the US from Italy at eighteen, so the young Valentino worked at odd jobs in New York before finding a steady job as a dancer for Maxim's Restaurant-Cabaret, rubbing shoulders with displaced royalty, and eventually getting embroiled with the alleged infidelity, divorce trial, and subsequent murder of businessman John De Saulles, having befriended his wife, Blanca Errázuriz. Essentially fleeing to San Francisco, so began a series of bit-parts, largely as heavies, gangsters or exotic villains (joining the unsung Japanese actor,Sessue Hayakawa as a foreign-coded counterpart to the all-American Wallace Reid); Valentino's star, though, was quickly to rise, his "cabaret parasite" in Eyes of Youth (1919) eventually leading to a starring role in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), the sixth highest grossing silent film of all time.

Valentino, however, despite his ever-growing fame, remained at a low wage compared to the other stars of the period, of just $350 a week,. In the first of several moves during his career, Valentino would quit Metro (the forerunner of MGM), for Famous Players-Lasky (later to become Paramount). 1921's The Sheikh, a sweeping epic, would catapult him to stardom, once again playing the role of exotic Othered figure as the love interest for Agnes Ayres' headstrong Englishwoman. More roles would follow, but once again, Valentino would be on the move, first going on strike, then, after an enforced break from acting that took in a lucrative dancing tour that only compounded his fame, came more films, though few captured the mix of critical acclaim and financial success that The Sheikh enjoyed, his increasingly lavish life-style at odds with the studios, and with his second wife, Natacha Rambova ever-more involved.

With Valentino headhunted by United Artists, and with a lucrative contract offering him far more control over his films, so Valentino decides on an adaption of an unfinished Pushkin novel, Dubrovsky, in the form of his new film, The Eagle. Director Clarence Brown, for his part, would later become the most nominated director without a win in the Academy's history (six Best Picture nomination), whilst rumours about the relationship between Valentino and his co-star, Vilma Bánky, who would appear in this and Valentino's final film, Son of the Sheikh, would circulate for years after his death. The Eagle begins with Valentino's Dubrovsky, a member of the Imperial Guard of Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser), rescuing Mascha (Bánky), and her mother from a runaway carriage, under the watchful eye of the Tsarina, who immediately takes a shine to the young man for his daring and horsemanship, and immediately gifts him the horse, and arranges to dine with him.

This though, quickly turns into a would-be seduction, and panicking, Dubrovsky escapes, with the Tsarina placing a bounty on his head. There's, as we've discussed before in terms of silent cinema, an economy to things, and the momentum of actions from heroic deed to praise to panic and escape as the Tsarina advances on the hapless young m,an springs the film into action. Moreover, this is Valentino at, undeniably, his most obviously heroic, his most daring-do, and his most charming-if you want to understand why the women practically swooned for this man, and why his brand of perfectly manicured heart-throb frustrated the masculinity of 1920s Hollywood, look no further. What The Eagle changes in the Valentino formula up till this point-though its financial takings never seemed to match its ambition-is to make Valentino an action star, something that Son of the Sheikh would continue. 

What is also evident, as Dubrovsky returns to his family home, is that things are very amiss-his father is dying, and the cruel, and larger than life figure of Kyrilla (James A Marcus) has usurped his lands, and even now persecutes and mistreats the local peasantry. Gone is the affable and foppish Dubrovsky, in his place is the pragmatic Black Eagle, a complete invention for the film, and a barefaced rip-off of Douglas Fairbanks in The Mask of Zorro (1920). This figure swears revenge on Kyrilla, sending him threatening letters, and attacking his men; but, of course, there is a fly in the ointment, and a major stumbling block for Dubrovsky's revenge-the very woman who he saved, and the woman who will soon don a new disguise for is none other than Kyrilla's daughter!

Thus begins not only a complex subterfuge in which Dubrovsky must juggle his revenge, in the form of the Black Eagle, and his love, in the form of arriving French tutor, Monsieur Blanc, but also remain hidden from the authorities. So we see the love between Blanc and Mascha bloom slowly across the film, slowly quelling the fires of revenge, though Brown and Valentino's triumph is in the final third of the film as the path that Dubrovsky will take begins to become apparent. That this is matched with a charming central couple; the chemistry between Valentino and Bánky is palpable, only makes this a more vibrant and surprisingly ageless film. For all the daring do, and life-or-death decisions, where the film is at its best is in the moments of these two lovers, of the quenching of the fires of revenge, and nearly a century on, it is where the film most speaks to a modern audience. Like all the best romantic films, it reaches across the years and captures the magic of being in love.

Valentino would make The Son of the Sheikh, a return to the character that launched his career; on the press tour, he would collapse, and, rushed to hospital, would die after surgery on a perforated ulcer, of peritonitis on August 23rd 1926. He was just 31. Son of the Sheikh would go on general release in September, and would more than double the gross of the original film, whilst his funeral would be even more extravagant, a colossal outpouring of grief from the fans who had lost their hearts to him. But Valentino lives-the beauty and the sorrow of cinema is that it is a time machine, and, for an hour or so, Valentino walks again, loves again, lives again.

There is an immortality to cinema, especially when you become one of its early icons. The Eagle for its part, may not be the arrival of this icon, or his slow departure over the sand-dunes, but it is without question perhaps the best glimpse we get of the great heartthrob of the 1920s in his element, as one of the most romantic, and beloved, figures of the silent age.

 Rating: Highly Recommended

Next time, we head for France,  and the charming Amélie in which a young woman seeks the owner of a box of curios and finds so much more. Why not start 2023 with a new resolution, by subscribing to my Patreon from just £1/$1.00 (ish) a month? https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond