“With respect to The Sheikh, the first film which Valentino makes in 1922, Moran of the Lady Letty, is a sort of negative image. This renders its construction rather interesting, and very eloquent its tepid success. There is the freshness of the sea and the open beauty of the port scenes vs. the aridity of the desert and the claustrophobia of the tents; there is, at the beginning of the story, a Valentino who is kidnapped, beaten and humiliated, yes him, just out the conquering guise of the sheikh; there is even a beginning of an undressing which literally opposes the symbolic of Ahmed. A much-courted and melancholically unsatisfied young man of the Californian upper class, Ramon Laredo di Valentino (the ethnic difference is suggested by the Spanish name) finds himself by chance in the rough grips of a groups of adventurer sailors, who stun and then kidnap him to add a man to the depleted crew. The first initiation in the new life which awaits him is, inevitably, the renunciation of the yachtsman’s clothes: with the blue blazer, white trousers, cap with visor (his “minstrel clothes”, the grim captain derisively roars), Rudy reappears in the triumph of a white vest, and lock of hair falling unkempt on his forehead. Naturally this is a new icon, the most classical and complete icon of Italian virility which he has had to play. Not by chance the image coincides with that of a sudden, temporary social fall from grace, but it is also true that the apparent fall will allow the bored bourgeois to rediscover some real values. Between moral conventionality and the lightness of a marine fable, this overlooked and in the end little celebrity-orientated film seems to open Valentino a different and immediately interrupted road, access to a more modern cinema. In a story which was certainly thought of in order to propose him with a straight and macho image, at a time when doubts had already begun to circulate regarding his sexual preferences and competence, Valentino is really quite beautiful, but without traditionalist Latin lover languor; he is explicitly young, resolutely sexy, and it is the screenplay itself which forces him into the laborious definition of his own role, assailing him from the beginning with an anything but innocent irony”.

Paola Cristalli, Rodolfo Valentino: lo schermo della passione, Ancona, Transeuropa, 1996