It Looked Like Araby, but It Was Really the East End
By BARBARA DELATINER
Published: October 20, 1996
''THE SHEIK'' is 75.
Although experts do not consider the fable about an English heiress's torrid romance with a desert chieftain a milestone in the history of the cinema, the Rudolph Valentino vehicle has a firm place in movie annals, especially on eastern Long Island, where it was filmed.
That geographic bit of trivia alone is reason enough for Dan's Papers, a local weekly, to sponsor screenings of the silent classic tomorrow as a cap to the Hamptons International Film Festival, which ends today.
Reproduced on video, the 80-minute movie will be shown at noon, 2 and 4 P.M. in the Cello Music Hall, above London Jewelers on Main Street in East Hampton. Reservations are a must, at 537-0500.
Valentino came to the attention of movie audiences in 1921, after years of struggling as a dancer and bit player, through ''The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.''
After that release, ''The Sheik'' reinforced his impact, setting the seal on the brooding actor's superstardom.
Despite being what Leonard Maltin, the critic, calls ''hokey and campy,'' with a ''racist-imperialist angle,'' the movie, he said, ''helped create the Valentino legend, showing why women went crazy for the Latin star.''
''Valentino was the James Dean of the silent period,'' said Michael Edelson, a film historian who teaches at the State University at Stony Brook. ''You know, he made a few films and then died, in 1926, and his image was kept alive and untouched by reality.''
That Valentino's on-screen love affair with female audiences -- ''his seduction of the white heroine was every woman's dream,'' said Mr. Edelson -- was fostered by the actor's exposure to the sands on Long Island can be laid to expediency. In 1921 shooting on location was a rarity. Movies were made on back lots in Hollywood or New York.
Because the production company, Famous Players-Lasky, was based in studios in Astoria and because traveling to North Africa to shoot a desert was beyond budgetary and artistic scope, the company settled for the closer sands of Amagansett, needing just a three-hour trip on the Long Island Rail Road.
Local lore has it that the film was made in the Walking Dunes section of East Hampton, a rare geological site where sand dunes are as high as 20 and 30 feet and, driven by the wind at the rate of one or two feet a year, move.
Carleton Kelsey of Amagansett, former East Hampton Town Historian, disputes that. ''The movie had to be made along the five-mile Napeague stretch,'' Mr. Kelsey said. ''Back then, without any houses at all, that stretch was flat dune lands. There's no way horses could have been ridden across the Walking Dunes, which is actually one dune, one huge pile of sand.''
Mr. Kelsey, who was 8 when the film was made, said he did not recall watching its production or seeing actors around the village.
''But we lived across from Mrs. Loper's Boarding House on Devon Road just about that time,'' he recalled. ''And I remember playing with palm fronds at the boarding house that must have been left by the production company.''
Wherever it was filmed, ''The Sheik,'' Mr. Edelson said, ''is the quintessential silent film of its time that seethes with the sexuality that was so permissible in Hollywood before the code. It's great fun.''