Film Review - Valentino

When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 at the age of 31 one hundred thousand people filed through the New York funeral parlour where his body lay. Now the legendary Hollywood lover has been brought back to the screen. Valentino, which opens in DiIblin next month, is the product of an explosively talented partnership. Ken Russell, the director, has become a byword for extravagant controversy with such films as Isadora, The Devils and Savage Messiah. To play Valentino, he chose another superstar, the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. By DEIRDRE FRIEL

It was a typically audacious choice.

Nureyev has had no straight acting experience apart from his ballet roles. He has no particular physical resembblance to Valentino; his looks are fairrskinned and Russian, rather than dark and broodingly Italian. What Nureyev has, and it matters more than anything else, is 22 carat star quality. When people questioned Russell on the wisdom of his choice of star he replied "He has this unique magic, charisma, call it what you like. He's probably the most glamorous and mysterious figure in the world today. "

The dangers were obvious. Two flammboyant talents recreating the legend of the Great Lover. Those who know Russell's weakness for fantasy and Nureyev's giant ego feared the worst, an extravaganza of overblown emotions with images to match. Yet, both Nureyev and Russell seem to have found in Valentino a genuinely challengging enigma. The story of the Italian emigrant who started his journey to fame as a 'taxi dancer', hired by the hour as a dancing partner by rich women, in a New York tea-room, and went on to become the smouldering hero of such films as The Sheik and Blood and Sand, is full of contradictions.

For all his sexual mastery on the screen, Valentino was a curiously naive and rather gentle personality off it. He was dominated by women, particularly his second wife Natasha Rombova, born Winifred Shaughnessy in Salt Lake City. In the film Rombova is played by Michelle Phillips, who started her career as a rock singer with the Mamas and the Papas. The other woman in his life, the avant-garde film director Alla Nazimova, is played by Leslie Caron, with whom Nureyev seems to have struck up an immediate rapport, perhaps because she started her career as a ballet dancer like himself.

From the start Nureyev, himself a much more forceful and independent character than Valentino, showed great sympathy for the star he had to portray. At one stage he refused to perform a crude bedroom scene because he felt it was less than fair to his Italian preedecessor. For his part, Russell seems to have ended up making a more simple and straightforward film than most people expected. There are flights of fantasy - it wouldn't be a Ken Russell movie without them. But to a great extent Valentino's own extraordinary story, the rags to riches tale of the Italian farm boy who became Hollywood's first romantic superstar is allowed to speak for itself.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK is riddled with flaws and studded with gems. It is too long, it lacks artistic unity and falls frequently flat on its face. But no sooner has it faltered than it is hurled back at you with breathtaking skill by the indomitable, incomparable Ms. Minelli. It is the latest contribution to the current boom in nostalgia, and the first period film for director Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anyymore).A musical with a difference, it is a tribute to the great Hollywood musical. But it is the difference which constitutes the film's' main flaw.

The boy-meets-girl ingredient of those early spectaculars does not, in this instance, come gift-wrapped, swathed in moonlight and roses. This boy is a far cry" from your All-American Wet unnconvincingly pursuing some simpering starlet.] imrny Doyle, a struggling saxoophonist, played with almost' unbearable honesty by Robert de Niro, is a thoroughhly objectionable, gum-chewing chauvinnistic child who is very good at making you laugh. He is such a hopelessly lost child that you want to mother him. Francine Evans (Liza Minelli) finds out otherwise and finds out the hard way.

The story opens on V.J. night 1945.

Thousands of New Yorkers and returned ex-servicemen are celebrating the end of World War II at a glittering victory party in the famous Starlight Terrace of the Waldorf Astoria. Ex-serviceman Doyle is girl-hunting with totally resistable charm.

"Francine Evans is sitting alone listening, with more than an academic interest as we will later discover, to Tommy Dorsey and his Big Band.

Doyle's line of approach she also finds resistable, He spends the night walking the streets having lent his hotel room to a more fortunate friend. But a series of

, fortuitous, if improbable, coincidences bring them together in the foyer of his hotel the following, morning. Mr. Doyle is about to be forcibly evicted if not arrested and Francine is bulldozed into rescuing him and his saxophone. They escape in a taxi, fall in love and the fun begins ... for awhile.

Francine, who turns out to be a singer of some considerable talent, leaves New Y:ork for a tour with Frankie Hart's Big Band. (Jazz fans will like to know that Frankie Hart is ,none other than Georgie Auld who is also the sound behind de Niros saxophone.) Doyle follows her across America and eventually joins the band himself. Inevitably they get married

I won't spoil the wedding night scene for you. It is quite the funniest scene the film except that you'll find you've been crying all the way through it! Francine becomes pregnant. Doyle is appalled at the disruption it will cause in their musical careers. They have their first serious row and she returns to New York.

Doyle stays on the road, takes over the band and replaces Francine with a third-rate vocalist. As business plummets he realises, with permanent damage to his male ego, that Francine was the star attraction, that she had the talent and that he is second best. He signs over the band and returns to N.Y. Their relationnship continues to deteriorate and when the child is prematurely born, after an exhausting ear-splitting fight in the back of a car, the marriage is finished.

There is an extremely moving and beautifully played farewell scene in the public ward of the hospital. Doyle leaves without seeing his son. Francine pulls herself together and gets on with the business of becoming a star.

It is at this point that the film changes course and I fear gets rather lost. It is only rescued by the magnetism of Minelli· who, looking more and more like her famous mother, hurtles to stardom and gives Scorsese his chance to indulge in the Busby Berkely grand treatment. Unfortunately he is less sure and certainly less disciplined in these lavish song and dance routines than in the rough and tumble of the emotional scenes.

Ten years and our lovers meet again back in the Starlight Terrace of the Waldorf where it all began. I won't tell you the ·ending except to say it was a relief. This film should be seen and not just for Minelli's triumph. It will make you laugh and cry and give you some great musical moments. And that's show business.

My first taste of Black Sunday was in book form at 20,000 ft. when for three hours I viewed with mounting panic the three Middle-Eastern gentlemen in the aisle opposite, seeing certain potential hi-jackers, possible political assassains not to mention mass murderers.

I relived the panic the other day when! went to see John Frankenheimer's excellent translation of that same book. But this time the character who most struck terror wasa blond, blue-eyed pilot. Captain Lander, played by Bruce Deran with a glittering intensity reminiscent of Anthony Perkins in Psycho, is a Vietnam veteran and ex-POW. He is now the twisted, tortured by-product of a war which robbed him of dignity, wrecked his marriage and finally destroyed his reason. Consumed with hate and holding all the American people in some way responsible he plots a terrible revenge. His fanatical resolve is carefully nurtured with cool efficiency by his equally commmitted girl-friend.

If Captain Lander's motives are purely personal, Dahlia Riad (Marthe Keller) is motivated by political fervour. A Palesstinian driven from her homeland in the war of 1948 she had learnt the facts of life the hard way in the refugee camps of Gaza. Her hatred of the Israelis is the discipline which governs her life and the lives of her comrades in the Black September Movement. They see Captain Lander merely as a cog in their murderrmachine.

Robert Shaw plays the Israeli secret service agent with remarkable agility and quiet professionalism.

Remembering the Munich Massacre and the Entebbe raid (about which three disgracefully bad films were made) the strength of this film lies in its credibility.

The casting is excellent and Frankennheimer's direction is superb. Incidentally he makes a brief appearance, a la Hitchhcock in the TV outside broadcast unit as an irate television director which is of course what he started out as.

He used twelve cameras to shoot the largest climax in cinematic cliff-hangers. As Captain Landers hovers over the superhowl where 80,000 people inncluding the President are watching an all-star hall game his good-year hlimp is preparing to disgorge its deadly cargo. Frankenheimer uses every trick in the hook to fray your nerves. His use of sound is particularly effective - jump cuts from frenzied cheering supporters to chilling silence, a trick he learnt in one of his early films Grand Prix.

Let's hope this film gives nobody any ideas.