The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Rex Ingram's sweeping anti-war epic — the film that made Rudolph Valentino a star overnight and established the template for Hollywood's prestige war pictures. An Argentine family with branches in both France and Germany is torn apart when World War I erupts, pitting cousin against cousin on the Western Front. The apocalyptic imagery of the Four Horsemen riding across the sky, the lavish Argentine tango sequence that launched Valentino's smoldering screen persona, and the battle scenes of unprecedented scale and brutality combined to make this the highest-grossing film of 1921. It remains a powerful, visually spectacular meditation on the senseless destruction of war, and Valentino — magnetic, graceful, dangerous — is everything his legend promises.