Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Valentino Rediscovering an Icon of Silent Film (1918-1922)

Contents: A Society Sensation (1918), Stolen Moments (1920), The Young Rajah (1922) and Moran of the Lady Letty (1922).

The focus of this collection are the four early Rudolph Valentino features, three of them incomplete, A Society Sensation (1918), Stolen Moments (1920), The Young Rajah (1922), and Moran of the Lady Letty (1922), with a delicious lacing of supplemental Valentino material, including three silent-era films, A Trip to Paramountown (1922), an episode of Screen Snapshots (1921) and the readily-accessible Character Studies (1923), and two sound films, the Cinecolor travelogue Round About Hollywood (1931) and the retrospective tribute Rudolph Valentino (1941), plus film clips of Valentino including a few seconds of color-toned 35mm footage from Stolen Moments, documentary material on Valentino and the Lady in Black legacy, still photograph and promotional materials galleries, audio segments, including contemporary recordings of three songs about Valentino’s passing (including one composed by Valentino’s first wife, actress Jean Acker), a guided Valentino tour through Hollywood, and far more.

The title of this two-disc sets the tone for this insightful and meticulously-assembled retrospective of Valentino’s early films, some nearly lost forever, his star power and the legacy of the cult of Valentino.

— Carl Bennett

The release of this two-disc DVD collection of Rudolph Valentino material is both a happy and sad occasion. Sad, for the unhappy survival condition and incomplete state of surviving prints of these films; happy, for the opportunity to view them in any state whatsoever. As most of the films have been mastered from rare 35mm and 16mm reduction prints, the look of the films in this collection are not the best. The rarity of the films themselves outweighs concerns about the visual quality of the materials utilized.

The film are accompanied by music scores composed and performed by Robert Israel, Jon C. Mirsalis and Bob Mitchell.

Supplementary material includes a 12-page insert booklet featuring an essay by Emily W. Leider; a few seconds of color-toned 35mm footage from Stolen Moments, promotional materials for some of the films, novelty short films, and production stills.

For our reviews of the individual films in the collection, see our Moran of the Lady Letty on home video, A Society Sensation on home video, Stolen Moments on home video, and The Young Rajah on home video pages.

The DVD’s high video bit rate ensures that, despite how rough the source prints are, the disc will render the best-possible image, even on high-definition television monitors. Incomplete prints of films are rarely available on home video, so the occasion of the release of this DVD set is cause for celebration of the opportunity to view what is, at least, cohesive representations of these films that have been hard to locate or thought lost forever. We highly recommend this disc set.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition is also available directly from . . .

Other silent film music scores by ROBERT ISRAEL available on home video.