“[…] What strikes us today about The Sheikh is rather its absence of sensuality, and its distance from any violent or savage accentuation. George Melford directs the location shots, all dunes and sand, as if it were a routine western with Arab rebels in place of bandits; and the internal shots like regular scenes from a middle-class comedy, only framing it all in arches and drapes which are supposed to give an oriental atmosphere. The East never seems really different, really mysterious, nor menacing: there is a sort of educated game of cultures being compared though an opposing elegance, colonial affectation against civilised exoticism, and the scenario is of the type which might take the fancy of the nascent bourgeois tourism. […] The surprise is, instead, the fact that in this domesticated horizon the really disturbing note ends up by being him; Valentino”.

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