In the days of the silent swashbuckler, the silver screen's Latin lovers were all too eager to demonstrate their swordsman skill. Rudolph Valentino would take on the title role of Sidney Olcott's Monsieur Beaucaire in 1924, which was described by one critic as 'a masterpiece of the united arts of the scene builder, the decorator, the costumier and the cameraman' As the French duke doubles as a barber in eighteenth-century Bath. Valentino fences with utmost elan, wooed ardently and at one time even disguises himself a woman. In 1925's The Eagle, Clarence Brown's elegant comedy of manners with the 'Lubitsch touch,' masqueraded itself as a costume romance, cast Valentino as a dashing Cossack guards officer who resists the amorous advances of Catherine the Great and banishes a local tyrant from his local district. But French director George Fitzmaurice's engrossing oriental extravaganza The Son of the Shiek (1926) permitted him to take time off from ravishing the dancing girl Tasmin (Vilma Banky) in his desert encampment to fight off scores of opponents, swing from chandeliers and give whirlwind horseback chase to the villain. Ghabah the Moor (Montagu Love).
Ramon Novarro got his first substantial break as the ruthless, dandified Rupert of Hentzau in Rex Ingram's The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) a film which showcased the pictorial genius attention to detail and unmatched feeling for composition that distinguished much of Ingram's work Ingram surpassed this achievement and attained the aesthetic of painterly pictorialism of the highest order in Scaramouche (1923) in which Novarro played the titular tole. Rod La Rocque played a novelist. Arthur Conan Doyle's gallant and vainglorious Brigadier Gerard in Donald Crisp's stylish and light-hearted The Fighting Eagle (1927). Ronald Colman though not of the Latin persuasion, rather improbably in the light of his subsequent career was being marketed as a new Valentino by Samuel Goldwyn, was teamed with Valentino's erstwhile co-star Vilma Banky in a series of costume romances which mingled swashbuckling and passion. He was a medieval Spanish gypsy avenging the rape of his betrothed in The Magic Flame (both 1927) and a Flemish freedom fighter resisting the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century in Two Lovers (1928).