The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Inferior to the silent Valentino version, Minnelli's epic is stale and verbose, failing to ground its protgaonists and their opposing views in any recognizable or engaging political context.

Visually inventive drama.

This is a magnificent cinematic rendition of a slightly flawed book. Commencing in the early 20th century. Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon) is the patriarch of a family with siblings as alike as chalk and cheese. He openly favours his French in-laws to the obvious detriment of his German ones. Despite this favouritism, though, when the father of this, by now, extensive brood dies, he leaves his considerable fortune equally to his two daughters and that's where the familial strife begins... Advance a few years to Paris and we see tales of profligacy, deception, adultery and avarice. "Julio" (an excellent Rudolph Valentino) - his vain and shallow grandson on the French side of the family adopts a rather libertine existence as a would be artist before meeting the wife of a friend of his father "Marguerite" (Alice Terry). They are remarkably indiscreet about their affaire de coeur but when her husband discovers he merely agrees to a divorce to avoid any scandal. It's at this point, the film takes a much darker turn with the assassination of the Archduke and the start of the Great War - in which the family find themselves on opposite sides. The things that mattered before, matter not now - she discovers that her husband "Etienne" has been seriously wounded and as she is a nurse, she tends to his care in a recuperation facility that when "Julio" visits and sees them together, shames him in…

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