Valentino

Watching Valentino, it feels like Ken Russell (writer and director of the film) hate Rudolph Valentino. In Ken Russell's insufferable pseudo-biography of Valentino, Rudolph Valentino was an insecure man trying to impress everyone how masculine he was yet he was unfortunate from the very start. Valentino is an exploitative, offensive, surpassingly boring, and most importantly dehumanizing. The songs were tasteless, the acting from Rudolf Nureyev and Leslie Caron were hammy, the direction from Ken Russell was pathetic, and it was also inaccurate. A truly dreadful film. Zero out of five stars.

odd story about an odd dancer

I think Ken Russell was a bit too hard on himself here. It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination but it does lose steam by the last hour and ends abruptly. I have a feeling that Russell's frustration (besides the money and hollywood's expectations) with this one was in part because he was remaking Citizen Kane about celebrated classic Rudolph Valentino and .... I mean those are two extremely high bars. And he definitely doesn't come close to either, unfortunately. But so what. Valentino strongly succeeds in its casting. Rudolf Nureyev is really perfectly cast as Rudolph. What he lacks in subtleties of acting he makes up in beautiful and nuanced movement - the naked sheik scenes are so beautifully orchestrated, a shifting tableau of beauty that hammers home the (well deserved) sex-symbol message in the most in-your-face but chaste way. Then there's all of the women - Leslie Caron, Michelle Phillips, Felicity Kendal, even Carol Kane - who all hit it out of the park and leave deep impressions of who they were and how they figured into his life. A feat thats certainly impressive when it's happening in somebody else's biopic - usually all of the side characters feel more like cameos than living and breathing figureheads in the person's life. The movie lacks in its pacing. It gets lost in Natacha Rambova for a little too long, and it lingers too long in the boxing ring. But there's still burning moments of Ken Russell Brilliance(TM) - including the flower veil at the funeral, the sheik moments, the powder puff singers, ballroom dancers around the boxing ring and the hordes of women scenes. A lesser Ken Russell for sure, but that's still high praise in my opinion.

A Ken Russell film. For some those words alone are enough to make a viewer switch off ,but for me even flawed films by Ken still have plenty of interest. His take on the rise and death of Rudolph Valentino was apparently not a good time for him and he would later disown the film as a studio tampered compromise. Despite this the film is actually pretty good even if Rudolf Nureyev is not the greatest actor in the world. The film charts the rise of Valentio form ball room pretty boy to the biggest silent film star in the world . He leaves a trail of broken hearts behind him and even breaks some noses as he challenges a blowhard journalist to a boxing duel in the latter parts of the film Of course this being Ken Russell everything is amped up including the acting by some of the cast ,but I guess that is because Russell wants to show pre sound Hollywood in all its horrible splendour. As I said the film isn't perfect the central casting of Nureyev was a risky gamble which doesn't pay off on the whole but if you can swallow the directors flights of fancy the film isn't half bad.

Valentino is a disappointing film. It is about the tragic and untimely death of a silent screen actor, Rudolph Valentino, in 1926. Rudolf Nureyev and Leslie Caron give terrible performances. The screenplay is badly written. Ken Russell did a horrible job directing this motion picture.

Overly dramatized production.

This is one of the worst biopics. Mixing fiction, fact, and legend it fails. The acting is some of the worst I've ever seen in a film. Its overacted and extremely full of Hollywood cliches. The story is poorly written along with the script.

another in a bunch of bio-pics about the legendary silent film star

This movie will be enjoyed by Ken Russell fans only. However, despite the slow pace and over-the-top theatrics -- the film has some pop-culturally significant moments. The now iconic Rudolf Nureyev is captured in all of his beauty and glory. And, it is interesting to see Leslie Caron as Nazimova. Peter Suschitzky served as cinematographer and he does some great early work here. However, by the time this long film comes to its end, you are likely to feel more than a bit cheated of the over two hours the film stole from your life.

Watchable only for Nureyev.