Spoilers below, mateys.Finally, an early silent that held my interest! Stars Rudolf Valentino and Dorothy Dalton in a swashbuckler complete with pirates and shanghai-ed sailors. Valentino made this one after his biggie, The Sheik. (He made four that year...busy guy.) Some interesting early photos of San Francisco... the title card accompanied by a photo of the harbor entrance, known as "the golden gate", 15 years before there was a bridge across it. They also showed the turntable at the end of the SF cable-car line. Some early gender-bending here - they call the rich playboy "Lillee of the Vallee", and the captain's daughter is quite mannish, and has no interest or use for men. The title card actually says "I never could care for a man... I'm not made for men. I ought to have been born a boy." The use of different color tints was a little distracting... when Moran is fighting off the evil pirate near the end, they switch back & forth between the blue and yellow tints. Also, the director frequently uses a close-up camera circle pinpoint to point out something. Probably since the medium was so new, he wasn't sure if the audience would catch what he wanted them to see. Good, steady plot. The set up, the adventures, and we see the conflicts get resolved so they can live happily ever after.Directed by George Melford, who had started out making shorts in the the early days of the film biz. Turner Classics is showing the 2006 restored version. I can seldom stand silents, as the plots are usually too simple for my taste, but this one was pretty good. If you appreciate the history of the film business, this one would be a good one to watch.

I liked this Rudolph Valentino movie. Perhaps this was because unlike his usual "latin lover" persona, this film features him as a rich guy who becomes an action hero! Hardly what you'd expect from this actor.The film begins with Valentino at a high-class party. He's rich and bored with the lifestyle--longing for something different. Well, his wish is unexpectedly granted when he is shanghaied aboard a rough and tumble ship skippered by tough-guy, Walter Long. Despite his background, it seems that Rudy is a natural seaman and takes to the life of a sailor.Later, they happen upon a derelict ship that is smoldering. It seems that the crew abandoned the ship and refused to try to save her despite pleadings from the ships' captain's daughter, Moran. When Walter Long and his crew board this stricken ship, Moran is the only one left alive. Rudy is warned NOT to let Long know the person rescued was a woman, as Walter is anything but a gentleman! In fact, at one point he seems poised to rape her and at another he tries to sell to to a band of bandits! In fact, Long is such a dirt bag that he plans not only to sell her, but murder his crew and replace them with bandits! Well, the crew discovers this and Rudy leads them in defending the ship. The marauders are killed, but no one on board knows that Walter Long slipped back aboard during the mêlée. Later, when the ship reaches home, Rudy goes to see his old friends. Moran and the crew think he's gone for good to resume life in high society, but he returns in time to see Long trying to molest Moran. In a climatic fight, Long gets whipped and Rudy gets the girl! Hooray! I liked this film because so much story was stuffed into the film and there was little room left for extreme sentimentality or schmaltz. It tells the story briskly and well--something not found in many silent films. For the genre (silent action/adventure films), this is a very good example.

It's hard to know whether Dorothy Dalton was always a dud or if she simply hasn't worn well, but her appeal these days is not readily apparent. Since that's true of a number of ladies who once made multitudes salivate in the silents, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Her acting's okay. Despite her top billing, it's absolutely Rudy's picture, and he's very good in it. He never looked better, and it's a nice, varied, physical part. Despite his exotic looks, and the fact that he's given a Latin background, this is still a nice-boy part. Wallace Reid could have played it.As with so many silents, one of the main draws is the realness and thereness of the exteriors. No need to record sound, so they go on location to San Francisco, they shoot on water, and I wouldn't take anything for the scene in front of a small movie house, where you get a feel of what it was like to walk in. TCM showed it in an absolutely marvelous, digitally restored print.

A fast paced seafaring tale featuring Rudolph Valentino as Ramon Laredo, a bored socialite who finds his manhood and a sense of purpose only after being shanghaied. Initially he is such a coddled dude that he drinks something called a "Mild Manhattan", but soon after being forced to serve as a deckhand he transforms into an extremely capable sailor( looking quite contemporary in jeans and a dark pullover) and earns the respect of the rugged crewmen who once dismissed him as a "soft thing." Eventually his path crosses with that of Letty Moran (Dorothy Dalton), a tomboyish captain's daughter. The two actually met briefly before, on land, where she was as almost as contemptuous of the city slicker in his yachting outfit as the crewmen once were. However, although she is initially as tough as Ramon is effete, the situation reverses itself once Ramon rescues her from her father's ship whose hold has caught fire. Although Ramon is impressed by her strength of body and purpose, Letty, in tandem with Ramon's growing masculinity, becomes more and more womanly as the film progresses, allowing herself to be assisted out of boats (perhaps not so much because she's suddenly helpless as that she's glad someone is finally recognizing her as female) and becoming clothes conscious enough to replace her trousers with a dress, albeit a rather plain and no-nonsense one. (In contrast, Ramon indifferently allows his swanky white bell bottoms to become muddier and muddier.) These character changes culminate when Ramon saves Letty from his nemesis Captain Kitchell, played by Walter Long (who costarred in The Sheik and once again plays a character with unsavoury designs on Rudy's woman).Entertaining, but in retrospect a bit depressing in that the ridicule Ramon undergoes as a ballroom dancing, tea sipping dandy mirrors all too closely the vicious powder puff slurs the real life Valentino tried to refute practically until the end of his short life.