Rudolph Valentino for Valentine's Day
 |
| Vilma Banky and Valentino |
If you want a hot date out with your sweetie on Saturday, February 13th in the Bay Area, you can't get much hotter than silent screen heartthrob Rudolph Valentino! The Niles Essanay Film Museum is screening Valentino's final film The Son of the Sheik with some fun Valentino-related short subjects.
You can buy tickets here, the suggested donation is $5 for members and $7 for non-members. Prepare to swoon along with Vilma Banky!
Niles also has a great museum of artifacts to check out! Perfect for the movie fan.
Mary Mallory and Karie Bible will also be signing their book Hollywood Celebrates the Holidays, a real Valentine treat!
Comments
Valentino – a little valentine
Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguollais
You’d know him as Rudolph Valentino. To see him on screen was to fulfill ANY woman’s fantasy. His slim dancers body in tight clothes gave an entire generation of women something to dream about. His films, such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, and The Son of the Sheik were mesmerizingly beautiful and shot in glorious black and white. His words, such as they were, were spoken in titles and accompanied by music. “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as fair as any she belied by false compare.”
His death at age 31caused mass hysteria among his female fans who met the train carrying his body all along its route back to California. My mother-in-law, when in her 80’s, still had a picture of him as the Shiek in a home otherwise unadorned by pictures. She proclaimed that he was the handsomest man who ever lived, except for Clark Gable.
A woman in black has placed a red rose on his grave every year on the anniversary of his death. This tribute appears to have been a publicity stunt in the beginning, but has continued for the ninety years since his demise. The current "woman in black" is motion picture historian Karie Bible.
Watch The Sheik today and you’ll see the magic at work. You’ll join the legion of his fans who yearn for his touch. This is my red rose to the great, incomparable, unforgettable Valentino.
Julia Peachum