The Sheik

Valentino abducts a British socialite to his tent, and the film insists the abduction was courtship. The close-ups are the product; the desert is Guadalupe, California. It is the picture that made him, and the one he wanted to be lighter than by 1926. Agnes Ayres is the socialite. George Melford for Paramount, 1921, from E. M. Hull's novel, eighty-six minutes.