Talk:The Young Rajah

"Suggestive Costumes"

The one scene in which Valentino's outfit leaves "little to the imagination" appears to be the rowing scene. Evidently that was the norm for the day. I have a photo of the 1915 rowing team at an Ivy League school in which all of the men are wearing tight shorts that leave very little, if anything, to the imagination. I'm not rewording the sentence about the film's "suggestive costumes" ... I've not seen stills from the movie ... but in the version shown on TCM last night, the only "suggestive" outfit I noticed was Rudolph's outfit in the scene of the Harvard rowing team. DL77 01:03, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe some of those scenes were lost, because the film was in such disrepair? Valentino was often photographed in clothing like rowing shorts, so I don't think that was the issue, but I've seen other stills from the film where he's wearing some pretty racy stuff. In the books I have, it says that the costumes were considered very sensational and sexy for the era. I found this on Google:

In The Young Rajah ( 1922 ) , Natacha found new ways to expose Rudolph’s beautiful body, in one scene dressing him in only a turban, revealing gold loincloth, and yards of enormous golfball-sized pearls, a costume which gained him much criticism.

http://emol.org/emclub/?q=book/print/336

Maybe the paragraph could be reworded to recognize that the scenes with these costumes didn't survive? Mademoiselle Sabina 02:41, 23 May 2006 (UTC)