Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2025 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Married Virgin (1918)

The first production of budget producer Joe Maxwell, a romance drama that stars Vera Sisson and a young Rudolph Valentino, barely saw release when completed and garnered little attention until after Valentino’s 1921 breakout roles in The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and its rerelease as Frivolous Wives.

This DVD edition appears to have been mastered for this slightly windowboxed video transfer from a 35mm print that may have been a foreign release version since the main titles and intertitles have been replaced with new video-based cards. Video producer David Shepard added footage found in the Library of Congress and in Belgium and Luxembourg to a surviving rerelease print entitled Frivolous Wives to reconstruct an approximation of the original release version of The Married Virgin.

The slightly contrasty source material is moderately detailed, but lacks some highlight image details. The video transfer itself has been executed on analog equipment at a moderate resolution resulting in some indeterminate picture detail aliasing, as well-evidenced by the flickering textures of the McMillan wicker garden furniture. The source print and video transfer both being of modest quality, this disc doesn’t look as good as others of its age when played on high-definition equipment.

The film is accompanied by a music score performed on synthesizers by Brian Benison.

Also included are exerpts from Eyes of Youth (1919), featuring Valentino in another early surviving film role (10 minutes), and Pathé newsreel footage of Valentino’s public funeral with exerpts from The Son of the Sheik (1926) (4 minutes).

The appeal of this release is mostly the opportunity to see Rudolph Valentino early in his career.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition has been discontinued and is . . .

The film is likely accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting recordings.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available from THE FILM DETECTIVE through . . .

All of the films in the collection have previously appeared on DVD in high-quality editions.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .