KEN RUSSELL seems to have hit upon a formula for making films. He finds some big celebrity with little or no experience in front of a movie camera, puts the name in a title role, and crosses his fingers hoping that the mega-star's sheer charisma will carry the audience through two hours' worth of celluloid. But Russell's experience with Roger Daltrey in the forgettable film version of The Who's rock opera Tommy should have taught him that the formula does not necessarily work. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb, and all of Daltrey's striking looks and blonde curls could not hide the truth. Had Daltrey proven to be as great a drawing power on the silver screen as he had been on the concert stage, Russell could have at least consoled himself by thumbing through the box office receipts while he burned the critics' pans. Although Tommy did enjoy some limited early commercial success. American moviegoers did not exactly shower the film with their dollars, much less their raves. A similar fate will undoubtedly befall Valentino, Russell's latest test of how much difference The Big Name can make.

Not very much. Russell should try fishing around for a solid script next time. Rudolf Nureyev is the subject for Russell's current experiment, and the results are no cause for pride. Admittedly, Nureyev took on a task more daunting then Daltrey's. While the rock star merely had to portray a deaf, dumb and blind parody of himself in a rock opera that his group had created. Nureyev was asked to bring to life one of the all-time classic leading men in cinema history, a giant of an era that the ballet virtuoso never knew. The role demands a certain presence, a knack for walking into a roomful of gaping admirers and creating an aura. Some scenes seem structured with this purpose in mind; at one point. Nureyev completely upstages a porcine-looking boor in a fashionable Manhattan night club by sweeping the latter's mistress off her feet. The episode, although somewhat gratuitous, is meant to show Valentino's swashbuckling stride. The desired effect is partly produced, but the strain behind the effort becomes obvious.

Nureyev's Valentino is mostly a credible performance, but he is no nascent film star. No glaring flaws scar his rendition of the silent film idol; he delivers a convincing Italian accent, and the spectacle of star-struck women clustering about this Valentino is plausible. The script wisely makes use of Nureyev's awesome talents on a dance floor at several stages, and the opportunity to watch him glide through tangos briefly takes one's mind off the film's many lesser moments. Russell did choose good raw material for the title character, but the script he co-authored with Mardik Martin provides little help for a novice actor in definite need of some solid support.

Nureyev's supporting cast does little to help pick up the slack. Making a comeback on the screen for the first time since the days of An American in Paris, Leslie Caron plays a middle-aged Russian star on the decline, who dreams of sharing top billing with the new sensation of Hollywood. Her performance betrays the length of her absence from movies; in a role that calls for an eccentric sort, Caron fails to discriminate between the passionate and the hammy. Her performance deteriorates into a caricature of The Beautiful People of that period. Michelle Phillips passes for the leading lady in Valentino, but not very well. At first, she greets Valentino's Latin love with a mixture of nonchalance and sassiness, a staged prelude to the actor's ultimate triumph. But Phillips's acting is always passive; like Nureyev, the former member of the Mamas and Papas finds herself in the midst of an unfamiliar medium of entertainment, and only a director completely in command of his work could have furnished the guidance that Phillips so badly needed.

Rudolph Valentino can justly lay claim to a certain degree of historical importance in the evolution of American cinema. During his extraordinary success in the '20s he revolutionized the prevailing conception of how a leading man should look and act. And his rise to the top of the silent film industry, the nation's newest rage, represented a sociological phenomenon in itself, given Valentino's immigrant background and the xenophobic America of the '20s. Russell's film never pauses to reflect on the significance of Valentino's legacy, however. The director seems too obsessed with the glory and worship heaped on the character to accommodate this biographical angle, and the film is the poorer for it. It is clear that Russell did not set out to produce a documentary, and no fair viewer should expect such a treatment; yet still it seems that a wiser filmmaker somehow would have worked more of Valentino's background into the movie, if only for the sake of an interesting perspective on a superficially charmed life.

A sure way to identify a filmmaker whose career has taken a downward turn is to examine which areas of the movie received most of the director's attention. When critics can only muster compliments such as "ravishing to look at" and "visually stunning," something is missing. Russell's Valentino is a case in point. The shots of Nureyev working on the California desert during the filming of The Sheik provide delights for the eye, as do the many crowd scenes. But the audience should be able to expect more from a director with Russell's experience than artsy effects with the camera. Russell never seems conscious of this obligation to the audience. The surface appearance of Valentino copies Russell's energies, at some loss to the personalities of his principal characters, and their motivations in entering the movie business. We see the baubles and caprices that filled their lives, but their inner thoughts basically remain a mystery. Aside from noting Valentino's closet dream of one day owning an orange grove and the star's dated brand of romanticism. Russell never provides Valentino with a full character.

Unneccessarily bizarre imagery has often figured prominently in Ken Russell's films, and Valentino certainly upholds this self-indulgent tradition. Russell uses a flashback structure for the narrative. The film keeps returning to shots of Valentino's various former lovers and co-stars pouring out their reminiscences alongside Valentino's corpse lying in state. Their histrionic babblings begin to grate after the first 30 minutes of the movie, and the trite sarcasms tossed out by reporters covering the funeral only compound the absurdity of these scenes. Another sequence finds Valentino behind bars on a bigamy charge. His fellow jailbirds include a couple of whores and a host of assorted low lifes who eagerly pounce on the opportunity to introduce the fabled actor to the seamier side of life. The nightmare that ensues calls to mind the twisted faces and perverse smiles of a Hieronymous Bosch canvas.

Perhaps the single most important quality that sold America on Rudolph Valentino was the romantic figure he cut during his short-lived heyday. He challenged the power wielded by Hollywood's biggest moguls over scripts and salaries, always standing by an almost quixotic sense of honor in an epoch sorely lacking men of principle. Although his career suffered accordingly, the legend that lingers only profits from this irrepressible streak. But in the film this trait is largely neglected until the concluding portion, when Russell decides to end the film with a famous boxing exhibition between a tubercular Valentino and a reporter from a New York paper that had published a scathing criticism of the film idol. To wind up the movie with this inherently ludicrous vignette raises some doubts as to Russell's real attitude towards his subject. The prima donna in Valentino dominates the film from start to finish, letting through only brief glimpses of the man's more admirable traits. He deserved better. The man who should have been the object of our praise is reduced to the object of our bemused contempt.