As far as I know, most of that film remains lost. Note Part II: I’m quite sure that the Young Rajah showing includes only a couple of reels. Note: Mae Murray – not Mae Marsh as per the TCM schedule – is the star of Delicious Little Devil. On Sunday, May 21, TCM will be showing the following Valentino films (EDT): Today she is also notorious as the brain behind the editing of Stroheim’s Greed (1924) down to the 10-reel version which survives to this day.” June Mathis, who played an instrumental role in Valentino’s rise to stardom, scripted several of Valentino’s subsequent projects: The Conquering Power (1921), Camille (1921), Blood and Sand (1922) and The Young Rajah.
The challenge of Valentino’s subsequent career was not so much to gain public recognition as to find projects which helped him fulfill the promise shown in this film. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse became one of the greatest financial and artistic successes of the silent era, earning the director Rex Ingram comparisons to D.W. The famous tango scene, in which Valentino got to show off his formidable skills as a dancer, helped catapult him into stardom, but he also attracted critical attention for his skills as an actor.
Mathis lobbied to give Valentino the key part of Julio Desnoyers, the young heir to an Argentinean cattle baron who seduces a married woman but later proves his valor in battle. The World War I melodrama, based on the bestselling novel by Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, was a pet project of June Mathis, a screenwriter at Metro Pictures. Rudolph Valentino profile by James Steffen on TCM: “The breakthrough film for Valentino was Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921).