The Conquering Power is Rudolph Valentino in a Balzac adaptation, as a young man whose love is tested by money, ambition and family pride.
The Conquering Power (1921), directed by Rex Ingram and based on Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, stars Valentino as Charles Grandet, a young man sent to live with his miserly uncle, and Alice Terry as Eugenie, his cousin, with whom he falls in love. The film follows Charles’s struggle against his uncle’s greed and his own desire for wealth.
Valentino’s Charles is romantic and earnest, and the film gives him a more restrained, literary role than The Sheik. His scenes with Terry are tender and quiet, and they show Valentino’s range beyond the exotic lover.
It is a signature role because it paired Valentino again with Ingram and Terry, the team behind Four Horsemen, and because it showed that his stardom could carry a classic novel as well as a desert romance.