“In a dramedy of middle-class manners, in setting full of horses, tennis courts, governesses and breakfasts in the open air, Valentino seems to possess, as if by involuntary memory, a certain decadent air of the Italian diva-film. His name is Conte Roberta di San Fraccini, he is a young adventurer, a soldier of fortune (as an intertitle suggests) in that field of tough moral and sentimental battles which is the haute bourgeoisie. He is also, naturally, a seducer, the lover of a rich businessman’s wife. He succeeds in blackmailing the daughter to marry him, while at the same time planning to escape An image suspended between dandyism and vulgarity, the oblique fascination of the Latin vilain who, to be sure manages to attract but who does not fail to arouse a remote social disdain. Valentino, future lover destined to grace every level of languor and passion, enters the scene as a young Mediterranean variant of the Von Stroheim model; and in the Conte Fraccini of A married virgin (false, corrupt, seducer and destined to a miserable end) one can even intuit a small pre-echo of the fake Russian count in Foolish wives“.

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