“[…] The Four Horsemen opens with a close up of the gaucho boy standing on the threshold of an Argentinean tavern, and with an exquisite sense of economy Rex Ingram organises a scene of a few minutes in which Valentino is asked to do what he does best: to look, be looked at and to dance. There is an exchange of glances with the ballerina, a crossing of whip with knife with the rival, then Valentino takes the woman and shows us what the tango is: he dances with his legs, with his feet (detail), with the shoulders, with his head erect, with his back elastic, aggressive and free and caught between the looks of the old grandfather Madariaga, a drunk and a card player. Valentino captures and is captured by looks: masculine and paternal looks, curiously, in this scene of star worship, mainly female looks in the immense reverse angle of the stalls which here discover and begin to fall in love with him. In this first sequence, which June Mathis ably transfers from the New York Bowery to Latin America, perfumes of wealthy ranches, bas-fonds shadows, sentences which already sound like Valentinain epigraphs (‘women are the ruin of existence: but we cannot do without them’) are mixed: it is an incongruously exotic beginning, and nevertheless infallible in giving the correct colour to the new divo’s charisma. With the gaucho’s clothes cast off, Valentino and history move in a Paris on the edge of the first World War, and the pot to play for becomes a sort of comparison between a caricature kultur (the expressionist grin of the German stock, bad, of the Madariagas) and a vaguely progressive feuilleton (the socialist past of Marcelo Desnoyers, who belongs to the good guys). […] New European life and the awareness of the pains of the world, again finds a Valentino still struggling with the rigidity of a summary technique and an excess of teeth (and Rex Ingram concentrates on the profile, burning the unsustainable smiles in a few seconds). Moments of sublime kitsch are, however, allowed him and they will go to found, among the others, the image of the immortal lover: he kisses a rose before giving it to his belle, he pushes the woman away from his own (adulterate) embrace when he sees her wear a Red Cross veil, the same veil which he will later bend to kiss, he and she – eyes tearful with renunciation, an erotic and mourning goodbye gesture”.

Paola Cristalli, Rodolfo Valentino: lo schermo della passione, Ancona, Transeuropa, 1996