In Blood and Sand, Rudolph Guglielmi, alias Valentino, the young Italian farm boy turned America's passion fruit, plays Juan Gallardo, a rakish country youth who becomes Spain's most celebrated matador. Gallardo marries his childhood sweetheart, but later becomes fascinated by the widow Doña Sol, who draws him into a disastrous affair. Between its tangos and bullfights, its Romance of Spain and its heavy-handed indictments of predatory vamps, Blood and Sand did afford Valentino an opportunity to act, as well as to shine: it's the film in which we see just what the appeal was all about.
Blood and Sand was, incidentally, edited by Dorothy Arzner, who devised for the studio a brilliant and money-saving system of combining stock bullfight footage with close-ups of Valentino. (JB)