‘Valentino’ or — Citizen Cock?
It starts with a dead body surrounded by Art Deco blackness reduced (condensed?) to the point of the abstract void. This corpse is poured over by Hollywood vultures seeking ways to exploit what no longer exists only to be interrupted by the chaotic mass of humanity breaking through and shattering the barrier of death. This should not be happening. Has the body just smiled? Possibly because immortality has just been achieved. Yep, this is a Ken Russell film alright.
‘Valentino’ (1977) tells the story of the famous actor beginning with his death then seen through a series of flashbacks all told by those who knew him, and what is immediately apparent is how long the shadow of Welles’ ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941) has loomed throughout cinema. The question here is — “Why?” Is this Russell glorifying Valentino… or himself? Let’s find out!
So Valentino (played here by Rudolf Nureyev) dies and the world loses its mind. The man was a gigolo, a dancer, a lover, a bigamist, a move star and, finally, a legend. He also had a spectacular penis.
Yet through this temporal shuffling of Rudy’s short life we learn more about the forces surrounding him — yearning women, jealous males, the Hollywood system, hypocrisy, homophobia — than we do the man himself. Russell presents all this through his usual devices, namely excess, artifice and extremes of contrast. This is one of the reasons Russell’s films can feel so shocking; it’s not what we see but the connotations between the images, although there’s plenty of shocking images on display too so maybe I’m talking bigger bollocks than those dangling between Nureyev’s muscular bum cheeks.
The brazen imagery here has a function. We get a rather explicit shot of Nureyev’s cock and balls but it’s included less for our immediate titillation (although it raises the sexual temperature dramatically) but to highlight what that packed cinema of rapt women are imagining, but aren’t allowed to see (we were either privileged or impoverished by our glimpse), as they gaze at the screen in the following shot. It’s incredibly effective although unsubtle as hell… but this is Ken Russell we’re talking about here so let’s not start complaining about lack of subtlety now. It’s those cinematic jolts we’re after!
A great example of a Russellian cinema jolt in ‘Valentino’ comes when June Mathis (Felicity Kendal) announces that Valentino’s next film will be ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ (1921) only for the film to hard cut to a scene of unhinged hypnagogic delirium as we witness Valentino charging across a landscape on horseback garbed in a gasmask and a helmet in the shape of a coffin. Except it isn’t even Valentino at all and we feel even more artifice piling up.
Likewise during a very funny scene when Rudy and Rambova are talking to producer Lasky on set during a film shoot, the background constantly changing in increasingly elaborate ways with each cut behind the producer’s head. It’s visually excessive and over stimulating, but Russell feels he hasn’t gone far enough so he tops it with a Jodorowsky-esque image of a vulture on a gravestone, wings majestically outstretched with the existential exhibitionism of Death itself.
The most riotous moment is when Valentino is imprisoned for bigamy. He suffers terrible abuse from the guards and fellow inmates in jail. It feels natural and believable in concept but bursts off the screen with intended insanity before culminating in a shot of Felicity Kendal in dark glasses with Valentino “trapped” inside each lens. It’s an incredible sequence but the crazy imagery still has a specific meaning. There is a vast amount of artistic latitude throbbing away here and it is exhilarating to feel ‘Valentino’ enter us.
Yet all this artifice comes at a cost and that’s a lack of emotional involvement with the characters; I never once cared about anyone on screen. However, I did care about what I was seeing ON screen and that’s this film’s strength, along with a vast amount of variation. So one minute we’re watching a scene that could’ve been lifted from ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ (1979) as adoring crowds deify Rudy outside his home before climaxing in a scene that I can only describe as Federico Fellini directs ‘Rocky’ (1976). This is not a boring film in any way! Of course the tale of Salome also pops up (it’s a Ken Russell film so how could it not) and I think this might be to signify the price, or cost, of entertaining people or demanding to be entertained.
‘Valentino’ could get on some people’s nerves, most possibly because of the frequent references to ‘Kane’. Why would a director deliberately draw comparisons to such a masterpiece? Is Russell saying that Rudy is worthy of such adulation and treatment, or is this more the director’s ego peeking out like the tip of a willy between those bum cheeks?
Valentino finally gets his hands on his snow globe of an orange but, like Kane, it is a dream he cannot possess. It slips from his dying grasp; Valentino has spent his last seed.
So ‘Valentino’ might not be entirely successful but its flaws are as interesting as its successes and when the film works, which is way more often than not, it’s an unstoppable, overwhelming, riotous machine spitting out sparks of dazzling imagination. I was captivated and entranced throughout.
When the movie finished I was left impressed by the unrestrained embrace of fluid sexuality, the energetic editing, the deft use of slippery chronology, the delight in excess, masterful use of music and sound design and that’s when a thought hit me — if only Ken Russell had had the chance to direct the Queen bio-pic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (2018). Now what a film THAT could’ve been!
