The Son of the Sheik

Rudolph Valentino's final film — and, many would argue, his best. Playing the son of his own character from the 1921 hit The Sheik, Valentino is a desert prince who falls passionately in love with a dancer (Vilma Bánky), only to be betrayed, captured, and tortured by bandits in a sequence of startling intensity. Freed and burning with rage, he kidnaps the woman he believes deceived him, and their scenes together crackle with a dangerous, almost modern eroticism. Valentino, freed from the stiffness of some earlier performances, is magnetic and genuinely exciting — you understand completely why he drove audiences to frenzy. He died suddenly at thirty-one, just weeks after the film's premiere, and the mass hysteria that followed his death remains one of the most extraordinary episodes in Hollywood history. A fitting final curtain.