“Natacha Rambova (born Winifred Shaughnessy) enters the life of Rudy as a dominatrix and ,to start, turns him into the Armand Duval of Camille. ‘I will be your servant – your slave – your dog’, swears Valentino’s Armand, embracing the knees of the thin and sinuous Alla Nazimova. It is not by chance that this lady of the camellias in déco clothes pretends a masochistic accentuation, a declaration of erotic vassalage from her young lover: Camille, a free adaptation in modern costume of a literary classic like La Dame aux camélias by Dumas, is the film in which the Valentino’s still fragile celebrity totally abandons itself to the talents and desires of powerful women capable of exercising a firm hold on him. This game of consenting passivity, this fabrication of the erotic object seems to play between the set and Dumas’ exemplary story, which here Mathis re-writes with a more seductive star and a more seduced Armand. It must have been, without a doubt, an interesting set: Nazimova still, perhaps, in love with Rambova, the most brilliant and independent of her protégés who frequented or gathered around her lesbian circle, Rambova suddenly attracted by Valentino who, for his part, falls at the feet of the fascination of the fake Russian, and in the background June Mathis, with her great power and brain, who, it isn’t difficult to believe nurtured a private passion for the Italian boy, hers by discovery and thus in some way by right. The result of so much erotic circulation is a cold, hysterical, extreme film most notable in the network of correspondences which it squeezes between geometries of desire and constructions of screenplay.

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