Rudolph Valentino
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Why were audiences, and especially the women composing them, so strongly and strangely moved by Valentino's "sex appeal"? There is nothing to show that he was not a respectable man, or that he did anything more than raise his power of interpreting an intense love passion to the highest level. True he did not teach or preach love as Stendhal's "On Love" does, as a proposition in algebra, but more as Freud does. The explanation must be sought in the ancient complexes inhering in the collective subconscious. An audience which witnesses a Valentino "sex-appeal" picture does not understand the scientific facts of the satisfaction of its sexual impulses, so the subconscious steps in and provides an explanation."--The New Spirit in the Cinema (1930) by Huntly Carter |
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Rudolph Valentino (1895 – 1926) was an Italian actor. In the 1920s, Valentino was known as a Latin sex symbol.