SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Sharkflei Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Cineanalyst "The Married Virgin" is a bad movie by the standards of any era or genre. The only reason it has received a DVD release from a top company is that it features Rudolph Valentino—before he was a star. In it, he plays a swindler who has an affair with a married woman, and they try to blackmail her husband and his daughter. The film doesn't get much from the otherwise promising concept of an actor playing a character pretending to be another character. In one scene, Valentino's intertitles state, "You pay me a great compliment. I had no idea my acting was so convincing - - - but surely you know it is a performance." Unfortunately, not Valentino or anyone else in this film gives a convincing performance. At least, he and Vera Sisson (who is probably the actual lead here) are tolerable, which is more than can be said about the awful acting of those playing the stepmother and father.The melodrama is overwrought and boring. By the end, it doesn't even make much sense. The marriage part of the blackmail is unnecessary. Why would the father be more willing to pay off a blackmailer through the marriage of his daughter and subsequent "settlement" rather than just giving him the money and not dragging his daughter through such an ordeal? Additionally, in a large offense of telling instead of showing and manufacturing a happy ending out of nowhere, a single title card exonerates the father of his crimes; a man, who throughout the film, we had been told was guilty of murder and graft. The title claims, "Actually innocent, McMillan knows he must flee the state to escape a political frame-up."There is also some jarring continuity editing—throughout the film, cuts just seem to be a bit off. I doubt that has much to do with the restoration of this film given the professionals who did it. "The Married Virgin" was a B-picture of its day, made by a production company that I hadn't heard of. Somewhat interesting in the film is the employment of a flashback inside a flashback in one sequence, and there's a through the mirror shot of a character in another scene.

Jay Raskin I saw this on a DVD that was part of a collection of Valentino films. Valentino does not appear for the first ten minutes, so I jumped to the conclusion that he played a bit part and the video makers were just adding it as fuller. When Valentino did come on, I found that I was wrong. He does have a substantial part and gives a very strong performance.One thing that is really weird about the film is that Kathleen Kirkham plays the mother-in-law to Vera Sisson. Yet Kathleen was 23 years old and Sisson was 27 years old when the film was made. Kathleen is quite good in the movie. She shows a great deal of passion for Valentino.The film is nicely shot and edited with a good and effective use of close-ups to emphasize details. Especially noteworthy is a flashback within a flashback, something I have rarely seen in a film before. Kathleen tells Valentino about a time when she overhead a blackmailer talking to her husband. We flashback to the scene with the blackmailer. The blackmailer tells the husband (Edward Jobson) that he saw the husband murder a man. We then flashback to the murder of the man. We then return to the blackmailer and the husband, followed by a return to the present time and the wife talking to Valentino. It reminded me of the nesting structure of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Nearly every scene reveals great details about the time period, the cars, the mansion with the diverging staircase, a game of tennis with small rackets, even the clothes worn to the beach are fascinating to watch and capture the time period wonderfully. It gives us a nice idea how the upper class lived at this time.The plot is not outstanding, but I think it represents a well done period melodrama involving a European Count who ruins a rich man by first seducing his young wife, then blackmailing him and finally forcing his daughter into marriage. The Count proves that he is a gentleman after all by not forcing his new bride to have sex with him, but saying that he will wait until she wants to. Thus she remains a "married virgin".If it did not contain Valentino, the film would be merely interesting, but Valentino's assured and well acted performance makes it quite enjoyable.

pocca A typical pre-twenties silent melodrama centered around a main character who must sacrifice her own happiness for Duty. Here we have Mary (Vera Sisson), an ingénue who, to save her father from disgrace, gives up the man she loves to marry a blackmailing gigolo, Count Roberto (Rudolph Valentino, playing a more developed version of the "cabaret parasite" from "The Eyes of Youth"). As often happens with this sort of movie, the wicked supporting characters of the gigolo and the sly, sexy stepmother (Kathleen Kirkham)—with whom he is in cahoots and having an affair—are far more interesting than the virtuous leads. Perhaps Lillian Gish could have made prissy Mary's dilemma affecting , but as played by Sisson she comes off as a gormless twit who cannot even wade into ankle deep seawater to retrieve a rambunctious toddler. As the teaser title implies, the marriage between the gigolo and the prig stays unconsummated, everything leading up to the moment when a frustrated Roberto breaks down Mary's bedroom door (surely what the original audience went in hopes of seeing rather than Mary's noble sacrifices). She doesn't seem worth the effort, but this scene is excitingly filmed and is an interesting precursor to a similar event in "The Son of the Sheik." Valentino and Kirhham make this film worthwhile (there's a real spark between them), but try to find the restored DVD version, rather than sloppily made video production.

Silents Fan This is a really creaky film that will be of interest only to hardcore Rudolph Valentino fans. The plotline is so full of inconsistencies that keeping track of them ceases to amuse after a while. Valentino is the only point of interest in an this primitive film with a maddeningly inconsistent plot. The irony of Valentino's casting in this film as a man who never gets to consummate his marriage with his virgin wife is heavy in view of his unconsummated marriage to Jean Acker in real life.