Director George Melford's and Famous Players-Lasky's melodramatic The Sheik debuted and established Italian-born star Rudolph Valentino as cinema's best-known lover. It was one of the first of numerous exotic and erotic (at least for the day) romance/adventure films designed to stimulate box office success. Valentino reached the peak of his stardom in this year (especially for female audience members), and also starred in Metro Pictures' and director Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), the top-grossing film of the year.