NR | Drama | 1 Hour 41 Minutes | $6.00 General Admission/ Members
Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik (1921) 1 hour, 21 minutes
&
Charley Chase in His Wooden Wedding (1925) 20 minutes
Rudolph Valentino, appears in his most iconic roles in The Sheik (1921). It helped to solidify Valentino’s image as one of the first male sex symbols of the screen and made him an international star.
Valentino plays Sheik Ben Hassan, a liberal-minded, European-educated desert chieftain who is in the market for a wife. Looking for just the right girl, he journeys to Biskra and throws a party full of beautiful Arab – and only Arab women – there for his ‘inspection’. He knows that his search is over the moment he sees Diana, Lady Diana Mayo, a Thoroughly Modern, headstrong Western woman who infiltrates the Sheik’s private party – mainly because, as a Western Woman, she is banned from the party- and her European hubris films her with righteous indignation and thus she infiltrates the party dressed as an Arab woman.
Ben Hassan reacts to his “love” for Diana by abducting her, taking her to his sumptuous tent-palace. This plot twist may be offensive to our modern sensibilities but it played upon a long tradition of Orientalism in Western art, which romanticized the sands of Northern Africa as a hotbed for seduction and captivity. Unable to resist the Sheik’s cruel magnetism, Diana’s defiant nature crumbles and she begins to develop affectionate feelings for her captor. Especially when he goes to rescue her from bandits who had captured her (which was mainly her own fault). Will he arrive in time? Will these two crazy kids find real love?
Well, this is a love story, a romantic fantasy. As silly as this may all seem, for the women of 1921, it was a story that made them swoon and even faint, especially at Valentino’s macho postering and sultry looks. The Sheik was a phenomenal success in its day, one of the first films to earn a million dollars at the box office (five times what it cost to make).
It turned all things Middle Eastern into a phenomenon: slang, music, books and most certainly movies – where it was widely copied. The Sheik became so popular that the word came to be used to mean a young man on the prowl. The object of a Sheik’s desire was dubbed “a Sheba”.
Also playing is the film short, Charley Chase in His Wooden Wedding. Chase plays a groom who, a few moments before his wedding, he receives an anonymous note with some startling information about his bride to be.
“Sunday Silents” is made possible by the generous support of Jim DeMaio, State Farm, New Paltz
Live piano accompaniment by Marta Waterman