“The Conquering Power, a modern adaptation of Eugénie Grandet, is to all effects and proposes a Rex Ingram and Alice Terry film, who in the meantime had become man and wife. In the amorous role of Charles Grandet, Parisian dandy, Valentino rediscovers the blurred softness of his lines, the worldly perfection of his clothes, candid shirt fronts, cups of champagne and brilliantine. John Seitz, who makes of this film an apotheosis of luministic flou, photographs it marvellously, but the screenplay (progressively corrected in the course of production with respect to the one licensed by June Mathis) takes away ever more weight from its character, and ends by turning him into a second lead. Ingram evidently had something else in mind for his film than a divistic confirmation for the young actor of the The Four Horsemen. Above all, he wanted to make a Griffithian film, as a homage to the master; and more than this wanted to make of Alice Terry his Lillian Gish, to concentrate on her the incandescence of the light almost dissolving her in a halo of soaveness, suffering and tenderness (the interesting notes on the subject in the fine and very well documented book dedicated to Ingram by Liam O’Leary should be read). He is also interested in pictorial vivacity, the description of the environments which are beautifully re-invented by Seitz ‘s photography, thresholds which frame rooms investigated in all their depth, corridors, luxury attics and prison cells. He is also interested in telling, with small lunges of cruelty (which Von Stroheim will show to have remembered two years later when he films Greed), a story of destructive and hallucinatory greed. In all this Valentino, to whom the romantic and most conventional coté of the story is entrusted, ends by slipping into the resignation of the background and does not even seem to have much fun when he is offered a small taste of his future destiny as sheikh, in a sort of tent-harem set up in the heart of the Parisian bella vita.

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