The 1915 silent film that popularized the word "vamp"

A Fool There Was was made in 1915 by the studio of producer William Fox, and it is the silent drama that launched the vamp craze and made Theda Bara, an actress nobody had heard of, a star overnight. A "vamp" is a woman who uses her charm to seduce and exploit men, the same idea as a femme fatale. The word is short for vampire, but the woman it describes drinks no blood. She ruins men, and the label is still used for that kind of character.

The story is a cautionary tale. John Schuyler, a businessman played by Edward José, is seduced on a steamer bound for England by a woman the film credits only as The Vampire, played by Bara. He loses his family, falls into drink and drugs, and dies after she tells him to kiss her. It premiered in New York on 12 January 1915. Frank Powell directed it and, according to the AFI Catalog, adapted the play for the screen.

Why a film about a seductress is called The Vampire

The film's working title was The Vampire. The AFI Catalog says it was inspired by an 1897 poem by Rudyard Kipling, the British author, called "The Vampire", and based on a 1909 play, also called A Fool There Was, by Porter Emerson Browne.

Bara's character is credited only as The Vampire. The Historical Novel Society notes that "vamp" is short for vampire, and a biography of Bara at EBSCO says the film added the word to American vocabulary. Dictionary.com first records the seductive-woman sense between 1905 and 1910, so the film did not invent the word. It is credited with popularizing it.

How an actress from Cincinnati became an Egyptian mystery

Fox did not sell Bara as who she was. Its publicity department said she had been born in Egypt, in the shadow of the Sphinx, the child of a French actor and an Italian sculptor, and that her name was an anagram of "Arab death". She was in fact Theodosia Goodman, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to immigrant parents.

The Library of Congress says the film's phenomenal success set off a publicity campaign unparalleled at the time, centered on an unknown actress with an exotic name. The AFI Catalog adds that it was reportedly the first movie to net one million dollars, though it gives no figures to back that up.

How much of Bara's work survives?

The film's best-known moment is a single line on a title card. The AFI Catalog calls Bara's "Kiss me, my Fool" one of the most famous intertitle cards of the silent period. In a silent film, the words a character speaks appear on screen between shots, and this one is how Schuyler's story ends.

Bara went on to star in more than forty films, and most of them are gone. Most were lost to a fire in Fox's vaults, and only four are known to survive. A Fool There Was survives, with prints held at the Museum of Modern Art and in other collections. In 2015 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, its list of films chosen for preservation as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.

It suits viewers curious about silent cinema, early star publicity or where the word "vamp" comes from. It has no fangs and no cape.

Drama