Even Valentino Didn't Make Me Stop (May Contain References to 'The Sheik')

Yes. Yes, I'm talking about Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla, the man more commonly known as Rudolph Valentino.

Out of curiosity, I decided to watch The Sheik, because I haven't seen many long feature silent films and because I'd never seen anything with Valentino.

I'll admit that I picked The Sheik because I knew the title, and it was the first I located on the Internet.

So, I watched it.

I'd forgotten how much silent movie actors and actresses would have been awesome if they'd been cast as Vulcan characters: there's a whole "eyebrow moves" code there!

My nan liked silent movies, and I remember watching quite a few (shortish ones) with her when I was a little girl. Most of the ones I did watch then were five to twenty minutes long and they were comedies.

The Sheik is somewhat dated: it's full of cultural stereotypes about the Arab culture and tribes, and it's quite sexist, but there are good bits.

The central love story works (it's even somehow disturbing to see that the secretly gentlemanly "savage" being taught how to be a good man by a "civilised" lady has been recycled since then: Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932) or even, up to a point The Mummy (1999); it still works in the minds of producers who have writers re-inventing the cliché).

And I can see why Valentino had so much success. He's graceful (the dancer shows through the sheik character) and he's far from being bad looking (understatement of the week).

For such an old film, it's rather good, and I'm glad I watched it.

Now... one of my jobs is to read scripts. Today, I cannot watch a film (or a series) without finding plot holes and continuity goofs (Mother has even taken to ask me to kindly shut up and stop over-analysing plots whilst we watch things together, but then again, I tend to yell 'Procedure!' at the screen when CSIs or police officers touch things without gloves and move things before taking a picture of the scene - it's just telly... I know). And so, as I was watching The Sheik, I did spot a continuity goof, and I sighed and thought 'it's a habit that comes from the job'.

It's become such a second nature that I feel like a sniffer dog with a talent for spotting plot holes and goofs. It's odd, but I got used to it - if not Mother.