Blood & Sand

Description

Product Description

An immortal icon of brooding sexuality, Rudolph Valentino has become one of silent cinema’s most enigmatic and entrancing performers. In Blood and Sand he stars as Juan Gallardo, a young Spaniard who achieves his boyhood ambition to become a celebrated toreador. But with fame comes temptation and treachery, and the triumphant Juan finds himself the victim of his own desires and the sinister charms of the exotic Dona Sol (Nita Naldi).

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Rudolph Valentino’s star power burns through this adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s exotic melodrama of an Andalusian peasant boy who becomes the greatest matador in all of Spain. The swaggering but sincere Valentino marries good Catholic girl Lila Lee, a coy innocent with bow-tie lips, but is seduced by voracious vamp Nita Naldi, a high-society man-eater who decides to add a bullfighter to her list of conquests. Journeyman director Fred Niblo (the 1925 version of Ben-Hur) mounts this grand piece of romantic nonsense with little subtlety but plenty of spectacle, and in the best Hollywood tradition celebrates the macho glamour of the sport while decrying its cruelty. While it lacks the grace or style of Rouben Mamoulian’s 1941 color remake, Valentino’s charisma and confidence and smoldering eyes give the film a simmering, sultry life that no remake has been able to capture. –Sean Axmaker

Additional Features

Kino’s Deluxe Collector’s Edition DVD is mastered from a 35-mm archival negative, which features scenes missing from previous home video releases, and is accompanied by a new Spanish-tinged score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Among its supplements are a filmed Orson Welles introduction, an afterword from a 1970s public television showing, and a Will Rogers parody excerpted from his 1924 short comedy “Big Moments from Little Pictures.” –Sean Axmaker