The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse made Rudolph Valentino a star overnight, as a young Argentine who dances the tango and then faces the horror of the First World War.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), directed by Rex Ingram and based on Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s novel, stars Valentino as Julio Desnoyers, a wealthy young man in Paris whose life of pleasure is shattered by war. Julio’s tango in a Buenos Aires cafe, early in the film, became famous, and his later service and loss gave the film its emotional weight.
Valentino’s Julio is charming, romantic and ultimately serious, and the film’s scale, from Parisian salons to battlefields, matched his rise. Audiences who had not known him before 1921 knew him afterwards, and the film became one of the most successful silent films of its time.
It is a signature role because it is Valentino’s breakthrough, and because it shows, from the start, that his stardom was built on more than a single image: he could play pleasure and pain in the same film.