Camille

Typically cockeyed Hollywoodian notion of how to approach Art, from self-styled exoticist Nazimova. Pointlessly updating Dumas' tale of the tubercular Mlle Gautier's doomed romance with her too socially respectable lover to 1920s Paris, the movie is all Style and no substance: art deco sets (designed by Rudy's later wife Natacha Rambova), hammy histrionics from Nazimova, and not a camera movement in sight. A pity, then, that the initially subdued Valentino's rather impressive performance is allowed to degenerate into overstatement, and then to disappear, as Alla indulges in interminable death throes.