A Film Canon

This is slightly better than The Sheik, if only because it claims less. Fitzmaurice throws the rape-fantasy that drove the original into much stronger, more exclusive relief, producing an even more exploitative conflation of sex and violence. It's no coincidence that Rudolph Valentino's arms and torso are finally - and ceremoniously - unswathed for the purposes of torture, nor that he and the heroine share their most erotic kiss after gunplay. In fact, Valentino's body accrues much of the topographical splendour that characterised the first film, reducing the desert landscapes to a nakedness that works in their favour, and perhaps explaining the predominance of nocturnal scenes. This erotic omniscience is comically acknowledged in the casting of Valentino as his own father (the Sheik of the original film) - part of a pervasively tongue-in-cheek, picaresque counterpoint to the demands for sexual sympathy; or, rather, an attempt to ensure that swooning is curbed by laughter. Hence the hysterical, acrobatic raucousness of the fight sequences, as well the occasional eruptions of slapstick, all of which tend to be structured around the rogue Arabians, reiterating their distance from the relatively orthodox, quasi-European Sheikdom.