A Film Canon

More iconic than impressive, The Sheik is basically a showcase for sex symbol Rudolph Valentino, whose acting skills are limited to a single expression of wide-eyed incredulity, bordering on vacuity. The narrative is fairly simple: while journeying in Arabia, a young European woman is kidnapped by a powerful Sheik (Valentino) and gradually comes to enjoy her captivity. None of it is handled very plausibly, and it doesn't help that Valentino is clearly not Middle Eastern, although this conforms with the film's anxiety to construe the central romantic exchange as merely exotic, rather than genuinely transgressive. That said, there's an interesting contrast between the heroine's ostensible status as the object of desire, and Valentino's clear usurpation of that role, transforming his love for her into a kind of self-love, in keeping with the more overtly self-congratulatory elements of his performance. But this seems more a result of directorial clumsiness than anything else. In fact, the most lasting parts of The Sheik are the willfully anachronistic images of Arabia, which exhibit a three-dimensionality at odds with the otherwise monofocal drive of the film.