In 1921, a silent film starring Rudolph Valentino was released named The Sheik.  It would become a huge international hit.  When The Arab came out three years later, it was clearly hoping to ride on the success of the earlier movie.  Starring Ramon Navarro in the title roll and Alice Terry as his blonde, blue-eyed romantic interest, The Arab proved popular enough to inspire a remake less than ten years later using the newly created modern talking-picture format.  Unfortunately for its producers, The Arab did not recapture the phenomenal success of The Sheik.  The film tells the story of a soldier caught in a fight between Turkey and Syria who deserts and hides out in a small village, where he seeks asylum in an orphan asylum run by American missionaries. The Turkish army soon attacks the village, where the local population promises to sacrifice the orphanage and its inhabitants to the Turks to save their own necks.  Will the soldier (the Arab) allow the villagers to send the orphans to their certain death? Or will he fight with his entire being in the effort to save the children and maybe, just maybe, get the beautiful daughter of the minister who runs the orphanage that is played by Alice Terry to fall in love with him?  You will have to find that out yourself.  Fortunately, this is one of the relatively few silent movies that survives today, thanks to the Russian film archive known as Gosfilmofond.