“There has always been a mantle of mystery around me, a consummation partly the result of chance, partly of design, and partly the result of consistent work on the part of the press department,” said Theda Bara in 1916. Born in 1885 or 1890, in the shadow of the Sphinx or in Cincinnati, the daughter of an Italian painter or a Russian Jewish tailor, she played bit parts in several plays beginning in 1908 and acted in the Yiddish theatre. As Theodosia Goodman, her actual name, she appeared in the 1914 feature film The Stain (Pathé) directed by Frank Powell. The following year Powell moved to Fox Film, where he recommended the unknown actress for the role of The Vampire, “the woman who did not care… And never could understand,” in A Fool There Was. William Fox signed her to a five-year contract on the advice of Robert Hilliard, the matinee idol who had played the husband on stage when A Fool There Was ran at New York’s Liberty Theatre in 1909; he predicted that “the part will make her.” It did. Renamed Theda Bara, she became a celebrity.
The artist Philip Burne-Jones (son of the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones) had prefigured the female vampire, a soulless “rag and a bone and a hank of hair,” in his 1897 painting depicting a satiated woman, her eyelids drooping, her mouth half-opened, leaning over the still body of a man whose chest shows the mark of her teeth. Burne-Jones’s cousin, Rudyard Kipling, wrote a poem called “The Vampire,” which began with the words “A fool there was,” to accompany the painting’s exhibition. In 1909 the American author Porter Emerson Browne used the poem as the basis for a stage play. That same year he also fleshed out her story in a novelization which provided the Vampire’s backstory: she was the illegitimate child of a peasant and a debauched French nobleman.
A slightly different vampire emerged in the Fox film (there had been two earlier movie adaptations: Selig’s 1910 The Vampire, and Vitagraph’s 1913 The Vampire of the Desert). Via the film’s narrative structure and its style – especially editing and mise-en-scène – Bara’s “hell cat” becomes, ironically, a more conventional but also a more dangerous “other woman,” wielding her sexuality to attain position and wealth. No longer the bad seed of a corrupt line or an embodied libido, she is an angry social climber whose seduction of the Husband is motivated by a snub from his wife. Even before she acts to entrap Schuyler, a father, Wall Street lawyer, and citizen-statesman on a mission to the Court of St. James, contemporary audiences would have recognized that she was ill-bred, if not immoral: her clothes are all “wrong.”
At a resort where most ladies are relaxing wearing white summer dresses and soft, non-tailored suits, the Vampire wears a tight striped skirt, and encases herself in an exotic form-fitting dark jacket with a long tapered back, like tails; the shape of this ensemble resembles a wasp’s carapace. Instead of a conventional wide-brimmed hat, trimmed with lace to keep off the sun, she sports a dark straw hat with a flipped brim on one side, with one tall trailing feather. Cutting-edge perhaps for Europe but outré in the Schuylers’ circles, she stands apart. Making her stand out even further in this milieu, she wears far too much make-up, especially around the eyes.
The Vampire is contrasted with a range of female types. First, she competes with the long-suffering, ever-loyal Kate Schuyler for her husband’s love. Second, she is contrasted with Kate’s sister, a spunky American girl engaged to Schuyler’s best friend. While the Vamp is deviant in every respect, the sister represents all that is correct and appropriate to the gendered norms of the day. Surprisingly however, the most intriguing female character vis à vis the Vampire is the Schuylers’ young daughter.
Her hair dressed in ringlets and a doll in her arms, the little girl seems to be as ingenuous as the Vampire is deceptive. And yet, an editing motif established early in the film parallels these two characters. In a series of juxtapositions, the child behaves like a “baby vampire” in the slang this film spawned, a vamp-in-training. Both characters are imperious, literally controlling where men sit and what they do. Both emasculate men. Twice Schuyler kneels before the Vampire, his head slumped on her bosom. Similarly, the child forces the family butler to play with her doll, to hold her kitten while she “reads” the newspaper, and to let her ride him like a horse. While these scenes function as comic relief, their pattern begs the question: would, could this child grow up to be a vampire?
The girl and the Vampire also function as rivals for John Schuyler. A striking use of mobile framing illustrates their irreconcilable, and equally impossible, goals: the child wants her father back, her family reunited; the Vampire desires social acceptance. A high-angled shot of a busy New York street centers on two cars driving side by side. One contains Schuyler’s wife and daughter, the other Schuyler with the Vampire. Husband and wife face away from one another, but the child leans towards her father’s vehicle desperately crying, “Papa dear, I want you!” While he cowers, the Vampire responds to her with a wave and a smile.
At the end of the film, the girl is brought to her father’s apartment. “As a last appeal I will take his child to him,” says Tom, Schuyler’s friend. She takes her father’s hand and tries to pull him out of his chair, towards the door and home. Yet the Vampire has only to enter the frame, and Schuyler turns towards her, never looking back at his daughter, doomed.
Kipling’s poem is quoted one last time: “So some of him lived, but the most of him died.” The film resolves the poem’s ambiguity: at the end, Schuyler truly is dead. His family is broken, his diplomatic mission to England unrealized. Still, the Vampire’s victory is pyrrhic. Alone again, without money, or sex, or love (at least temporarily), she’s last seen dressed similarly to the figure in the Burne-Jones painting, smiling over Schuyler’s body. That final image reinforces the moral void at her centre, much as Kipling does with his last line, “(Seeing, at last, she could never know why) / And could never understand!”

Leslie Midkiff DeBauche

The music A Fool There Was has always fascinated me – there is so little of Theda Bara left to see, it was a shatteringly popular success upon release, its director (Frank Powell) is barely a footnote in film history, and it has had an unequivocally negative (and often snide) assessment in film histories up to the present. What is it?
A damned good film, in my opinion, and one whose emotional impact has made it one of the hardest things to compose for I’ve ever faced.
Such a progressively degrading and bleak narrative, so well depicted by its stars, writers, director, and cameraman (George Schneiderman was a genius, I must say) has impacted me very hard. I don’t know if that will come through in the music I’ve composed, but I have viewed this not so much as a morality tale but as a story of severely flawed human beings who all have the capacity of free will, but choose their paths according to their class, personalities, and predilections. No one is simple or simplistically portrayed; there are moral and ethical choices everywhere, and most of them are misdirected. Though it would be a stretch beyond belief to equate director Frank Powell and scenarist Roy McCardell’s effort with, say, the films of Evgeni Bauer, there are corollaries here and there with elements of Bauer’s intricate fatalistic outlook. There is a control in Theda Bara’s performance throughout the film which makes Edward José’s dissolution all the more painful to watch – if you accept the premise. I stress this because I think of Bara’s character as a succubus – succubi are accepted psychological personae, and Theda Bara’s part is not a male fantasy, but a female entirely in charge of herself in a specific mental and emotional way, obtaining strength and independence through methodically using others to her own ends. She is, in a way, almost admirable; she is certainly compelling to watch and assess in every respect. And the focus is on her and her psyche from the opening credit: “a psychological drama by Porter Emerson Brown”.
Musically, it has been difficult to fully complement this film. Its bleakness has been a challenge to partner, as much as I desire to embrace it. I try to make colors emerge from the progressive despair and not have it be simply melodramatically monochrome; glints of tension, corruption, and attractive evil coming through the harmony and melody are what I believe highlight the emotion and pain that seeps through the film to its final moments. Musically I am a craftsman first and an artist second; A Fool There Was is a film that must be viewed as craft that became art, almost in an unconscious way, and I hope to link with it sympathetically and evocatively, however it may be viewed by modern audiences.

Philip C. Carli