“Strangely, in Virtuous sinners, an edifying melodrama filmed in 1919 and confined to the fifty metres of a Lower East Side rather approximately reconstructed in the studio, Valentino is again just an extra, a face in the crowd, without a name in the credits: but, paradoxically, this time his face is an unforgettable one, the brown wild face of a street kid in an absolutely ‘photogenic’ close-up, while he queues outside a branch of the salvation Army to have his hat filled with apples (the star of the film is Norman Kerry, a small time gangster with a thin moustache whose soft heart, foreseen by the script, is not immediately obvious: and Valentino’s friendship with Kerry, refined animator of Hollywood gay circles, is one of the elements which, from a certain point on, contributes to spreading doubting rumours regarding the Italian divo’s virility)”.

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