A Fool There Was *** (1915, Theda Bara, Edward José, Runa Hodges, Mabel Frenyear) – Classic Movie Review 10,690

Theda Bara plays the cinema’s first sex goddess, a seductive woman referred to as a ‘vampire’, in director Frank Powell’s 1915 American silent drama film A Fool There Was,  which was long considered controversial for such risqué intertitle cards as ‘Kiss me, my fool!’ and banned in the UK. It is not Bara’s first film (The Stain from 1914 is), but it is her first lead role.

This early black and white silent film version of Porter Emerson Browne’s 1909 Broadway stage hit is inspired like the play by Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire, in which a happily married diplomat, Edward José as The Husband, sent to Europe, succumbs to the temptations of a vamp.

The “Vamp” (Theda Bara) and the wealthy family man (Edward José) she seduces and ruins.

It is important as a piece of cinema history that made both Bara and the vamp character instantly world famous, making producer William Fox (founder of the studio) rich in the process.

One of the few Bara movies to survive, it is fascinating to watch now, even if her sex goddess performance consists of bewilderingly empty stares to camera. Bara certainly puts the camp in vamp.

A Fool There Was (1915) is one of the few extant films featuring Theda Bara. It popularised the word vamp (short for vampire). In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry as ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’.

Bara’s credit is The Vampire, and so the film is sometimes cited as the first vampire movie, but, as in Kipling’s poem, the term is used metaphorically. The character is not literally a vampire, she is a femme fatale who causes the moral degradation of those she seduces, fascinating then exhausting her victims.

Though the film has scenes set in England and Italy, the entire movie was filmed in St Augustine, Florida. Though scenes take place in the UK, the film was rejected by the British Board of Film Censors, as part of its policy of rejecting films with illicit sexual relationships, and was not public shown in the UK.

An actor read the full Kipling poem to the audience before each initial showing,

The Fox studio gave out an elaborate fictional biography of Theda Bara, making her an exotic Arabian actress, and then they leaked to the press that the whole thing was a hoax, in one of Hollywood’s first publicity stunts.

The last two prints of Cleopatra (1917) known to exist were destroyed in fires at the Fox studios in 1937, along with most of Bara’s other films for Fox. The majority of the film is now considered lost. Only brief fragments of footage are known to survive. I know films caught fire easily, but I can’t think the studios were looking after them properly.

Frank Powell, the director, also portrays The Doctor.

Also in the cast are Edward José as The Husband, May Allison as The Wife’s Sister, Mabel Frenyear as The Wife, Runa Hodges as The Child, Clifford Bruce, Victor Benoit, Minna Gale, and Creighton Hale. Frank Powell, the director, also portrays The Doctor.

[Spoiler alert] In drama terms, it is a shock that the Husband does not experience a redemption, even when he hears the cries of his daughter, and that the Vampire is not punished for destroying a family.

It is the first screen appearance of World War One-era film actress May Allison (1890 – 1989).

A Fool There Was is directed by Frank Powell, runs 67 minutes, is made by Fox Film Corporation (as William Fox Vaudeville Company), is released by Box Office Attractions Company (1915) (US), is written by Roy L McCardell (‘picturized by’, ie screenplay by), based on the play by Porter Emerson Browne and Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Vampire, is shot by George Schneiderman, Lucien Andriot and Frank Powell, and produced by William Fox and Frank Powell.

The other surviving Bara films are The Stain (1914), East Lynne (1916), The Unchastened Woman (1925), and two short comedies for Hal Roach in the mid-1920s.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,690

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