Virginia Warwick Movies

Speed Creswell (Frank Merrill) and his father (Joe Girard) have a difference of opinion over the son's responsibility in this action adventure. The elder Creswell is an oil magnate who worries his son has no business sense. David Brierly (Gino Corrado) is the crooked foreman who tries to sabotage an important oil reserve and drive Crewsell out of business. Newspaper reporter Vera Wray (Virginia Warwick) uncovers the plot and notifies Speed. The good son races to prevent his father from signing over the property to scheming land grabbers in this film co-starring Ed O'Brien and Slim Cole. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

It sounds like an interesting concept -- take star/crack stuntman Richard Talmadge and have him play a motorcycle champion who gets entangled in Graustarkian intrigue. But this picture is not up to par for Talmadge, and he's only good in one-half of the dual role he is given (luckily the double exposures are kept to a minimum). Motorcycle competitor Jimmy Martin (Talmadge) is a dead ringer for Charles, the king of Mandavia (also Talmadge). Traitor Rodolph D'Henri (Harry Van Meter) has kidnapped the king and he tricks Martin into standing in for the missing ruler. Martin goes along with it until he realizes that D'Henri's motives are less than honorable. He reveals his true identity to Princess Margaret of Alvernia (Virginia Warwick), with whom he has fallen in love, and then he turns his efforts towards foiling D'Henri's plot. He rescues the king and exposes D'Henri for the villain he really is. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

The mystical novels of Vicente Blasco-Ibanez were much prized by ambitious silent filmmaker Rex Ingram, who filmed two of them in the 1920s, both ostensibly vehicles for his actress wife Alice Terry. The first of the two, Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, was infinitely more successful than the second (Mare Nostrum), a fact that can be attributed to two little words: Rudolph Valentino. The quintessential Latin Lover stars as Julio, the scion of a wealthy Argentinian family. During the years prior to World War I, Julio's relatives relocate to Germany and France, with Julio opting for the latter country, where he opens an art studio. Here he carries on a torrid affair with Alice Terry, the wife of an attorney. When World War I breaks out, Terry joins the Red Cross and her husband enlists in the army, while the carefree Julio avoids involvement in the conflict. Only when visited by the spectres of the Four Horseman--war, conquest, famine, and death--does Julio don a uniform. His death is a symbolic sacrifice on behalf of Ms. Terry, whose husband has been blinded in the war: and, in an additional symbolic grace-note, Julio dies at the hands of his own cousin, now a German officer. The film's Big Money sequence was the one in which Rudolph Valentino danced the forbidden tango in a dingy, smoke-filled Argentinian cantina. That's what made him a star, not all that mumbo-jumbo about fate, destiny, and Four Horsemen. Proof that Valentino and not Blasco-Ibanez was the principal drawing card of this film was the 1962 remake, in which Glenn Ford portrays Julio. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi