No, she’s not that kind of vampire. In 1915, the word had a different meaning than it does today. Theda Bara was the original vamp!
Before she became Theda Bara, she was Born Theodosia Goodman, and moved from Cincinnati to New York in 1905, hoping to become a stage actress. She spent several years chasing success on Broadway and in Yiddish theater, to no avail. Though initially opposed to working in films, she eventually decided to give the medium a try, and she became, against long odds, one of the most popular movie stars of her day. Though nearly 30, and heavy-set in an age of waif-like stars, Bara invented what came to be known as the Vamp, and launched a career as a sort of anti-Mary Pickford, who was then known as America’s Sweetheart.
Her big break was A Fool There Was, in which she plays the vampire. Again, not that kind of vampire, though Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” upon which the film is loosely based, did draw some of its imagery from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Bara’s vampire is more of an emotional parasite than a blood-sucker. She lures men to their doom by making them fall in love with her, after which they stagger to an untimely end, down a path of alcoholism and loneliness once she abandons them for a new conquest.
That’s more or less the plot of this film. Bara’s vampire has just left her current lover, and is now intent upon seducing her latest mark, wealthy lawyer and diplomat and devoted husband and father, John Schuyler, played by Edward Jose. Her spurned lover commits suicide practically in front of Schuyler, but even that isn’t enough to convince him of the danger he’s in, and he eventually abandons his wife and child to take up with the Vampire. He slowly spirals downward into a drunken despair, and ends the film dropping dead, having been drained of his life force by the Vampire, who ends the film standing over his corpse, mocking him and tossing flower petals atop him. By this point, she’d already moved on to a new victim, and only returned to taunt him. Fade to black; feel depressed.
The most depressing thing to me is that nearly every film Theda Bara made has been lost. Only this and two others survive. I know in the greater scheme of things that pales in comparison to true tragedies, but in a cinematic sense, it is deeply tragic. I went on about this last time, and I won’t dwell on it much more this time, but my soul aches when I realize that most of the films of the silent era are gone forever, and nearly all that have survived are in bad shape. Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost, and the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever.
Let’s talk more about Theda Bara. Here she is as Cleopatra, in a film of the same name from 1917, now lost.
Look at the clarity of that image. Even if the film had survived, it would look nothing like that. Here’s another still of her, in full vamp mode, no doubt posed with her latest victim. Look at that eye makeup. She wouldn’t have to change a thing to fit into 2022 Hollywood.
I’m not exaggerating when I say she was a phenomenon in her day, in part due to the backstory her studio cooked up for her. They touted her as the daughter of a French artist and his Arabian mistress, and that she was “born in the shadow of the Sphinx.” Her stage name, Theda Bara, is an anagram of Death Arab. Her press conferences were legendary, held in rooms thick with incense smoke, atmospheric lighting, and crystal balls. The public bought into it. Bara was even subpoenaed once as an expert on vampires. The following clippings tell the story better than I can.
There will never be another like her. And sadly, we will only know about her from accounts of the day like those above, and two surviving films. I watched this film on a DVD. Click the picture below if you’d like to buy a copy of your own.
Next I’m watching: Alice in Wonderland [1915], directed by W.W. Young.
A Fool There Was (Jan. 12, 1915)