FADING GHOST OF A GHOST

Taranaki Daily News, 3 November 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

FADING GHOST OF A GHOST

Rudolph Valentino Still Has His Worshippers

ONLY ONE OF HIS FILMS NOW LEFT IN ENGLAND JJUDOLPH Valentino has been dead ■ for eight years. To most of his English admirers he was never anything but a ghost of the screen even when he lived. And during these eight years the ghost of their ghost has walked on the screen at intervals for them again (says a writer in the “News-Chronicle”). Audiences have sat silently in the

darkness with melancholy pleasure in their souls watching it stalk. The ghost of Valentino is threatening to disappear from sight altogether. The shadow must ultimately vanish into the deeper shadows. It is believed that there is only one of his films left in England. The time is bound to come when this celluloid remnant of the handsome hero will become brittle and cracked, and Miss M. C. Elliot, the hon. secretary of the Valentino Association, told me that they had tried in vain to buy Valentino films from the producers in America. They will not sell. Members of the association and others have consoled themselves in going to see Valentino films. The eighth anniversary of his death saw something like a pilgrimage to the Forum Theatre, in Villiers Street, London, where they showed him in “The Son of the Sheik”—the last link in England. These people, some of whom have seen the film many times, are trying to print Valentino indelibly on their minds against the time when the dashing ghost will disappear. They are sorrowing because the shadow that even to-day is winning him admirers and drawing members to the association that bears his name will one day haunt the darkness of the cinemas no more.