There is no musical accompaniment to this 39-minute, 1920, Rudolph Valentino feature that's available on YouTube so an eerie silence prevails throughout. It opens with the silhouette of a young woman shouting and pointing at something along the rocky sea shore. In fact, we then see a whole lot of bathing beauties running around on the boulders and the sand, laughing and chatting, and having the kind of good time you can only have in the movies or when you're fourteen and high.
I must say, the bathing suits vary in style, as I think some reviewer pointed out. Some are full and frilly. (No bodily contours, please.) Others look like SCUBA wet suits, and they're much to be preferred. The titles sometimes sound salacious. "MEN, HANG ONTO YOUR HATS. LADIES, HANG ON TO YOUR MEN!" No modern viewer needs to hang onto his hat though. It's curious how customs evolve so quickly. It develops that we're looking at an island that seems to be full of girls but with few men, ruled by a creakingly old monarch wearing a spiked German helmet from World War I, which we must remember had ended only two years earlier.
Well, Julian Eltinge is the best football passer in his college. He gets an invitation to join a fellow student, Carlos, on "The Isle of Love," which is apparently somewhere in Latin America. Eltinge is forced to leave his sweetheart and his mother behind. They weep and give him a memento, reminding him to keep it pure, even if there's a revolution. Getting bored yet?
Rudolph Valentino is recruited by the hero and Carlos to lead the fight to take over the throne, foiling the plans of two heavies to do it. There are a couple of references to Valentino's films -- "Blood and Sand" and "The Sheik." The latter is used as a verb. Eltinge agrees to dress as a woman and meet Valentino at a certain café on the Isle of Love, but warns him over the phone, "Don't SHEIK me." I think it was somewhere around here that I began to get lost.
The plot turns a bit more turgid. The bathing beauties on the beach do grotesque gavottes. In the café, the leading dancer does a number that's rather nice, even without music, that looks borrowed from the style of Isadora Duncan. Valentino is there too, looking a little oily in his mustache. Virginia Rappe is darkly pretty. She met a pretty bad end, not that any ends are particularly good.
I didn't find the story, a fantasy, very interesting except as a peep into the past. This is what people who went to the moving pictures found entertaining. This is the way they dressed. This is the way Los Angeles looked -- uncrowded, unsmogged, not wrapped in freeways, and if not itself an isle of love, at least an equable climate and a good place to grow jasmine.
I must say, the bathing suits vary in style, as I think some reviewer pointed out. Some are full and frilly. (No bodily contours, please.) Others look like SCUBA wet suits, and they're much to be preferred. The titles sometimes sound salacious. "MEN, HANG ONTO YOUR HATS. LADIES, HANG ON TO YOUR MEN!" No modern viewer needs to hang onto his hat though. It's curious how customs evolve so quickly. It develops that we're looking at an island that seems to be full of girls but with few men, ruled by a creakingly old monarch wearing a spiked German helmet from World War I, which we must remember had ended only two years earlier.
Well, Julian Eltinge is the best football passer in his college. He gets an invitation to join a fellow student, Carlos, on "The Isle of Love," which is apparently somewhere in Latin America. Eltinge is forced to leave his sweetheart and his mother behind. They weep and give him a memento, reminding him to keep it pure, even if there's a revolution. Getting bored yet?
Rudolph Valentino is recruited by the hero and Carlos to lead the fight to take over the throne, foiling the plans of two heavies to do it. There are a couple of references to Valentino's films -- "Blood and Sand" and "The Sheik." The latter is used as a verb. Eltinge agrees to dress as a woman and meet Valentino at a certain café on the Isle of Love, but warns him over the phone, "Don't SHEIK me." I think it was somewhere around here that I began to get lost.
The plot turns a bit more turgid. The bathing beauties on the beach do grotesque gavottes. In the café, the leading dancer does a number that's rather nice, even without music, that looks borrowed from the style of Isadora Duncan. Valentino is there too, looking a little oily in his mustache. Virginia Rappe is darkly pretty. She met a pretty bad end, not that any ends are particularly good.
I didn't find the story, a fantasy, very interesting except as a peep into the past. This is what people who went to the moving pictures found entertaining. This is the way they dressed. This is the way Los Angeles looked -- uncrowded, unsmogged, not wrapped in freeways, and if not itself an isle of love, at least an equable climate and a good place to grow jasmine.
