A Film Canon

An interesting, if not overly accomplished, attempt to translate the 'vamp' into cinematic language, A Fool There Was substitutes the rhythms of Kipling's source poem for any particularly artful editing, narrative pace or character development. That said, the opening act artfully juxtaposes the solitary, unnamed 'vamp' (Theda Bara) with a profuse, riotous middle-class circle of family, friends and acquaintances, making it clear that her transgression lies as much in her individualistic outlook as anything else, itself subsumed into a satanic isolationism that finds most perfect expression in Powell's elision of the period over which she seduces 'The Husband' (Edward Jose), an act that is thereby imbued with the sensational, supernatural suddenness of a spell, or hex. Similarly, there's a certain originality to the film's frankness about lust, albeit not so much in the performance of Theda Bara which, despite being relatively nuanced, is nevertheless too typecast to be genuinely affronting, but in the peculiarly physical, and even abject, vulnerability that her suitors suffer - from the suicide that ushers in 'The Husband''s narrative, to the physical addiction that ends it; an inability to refrain from clawing at, hanging off, and falling prostrate in front of her, reducing him to the domestic imprisonment more commonly attached to melodramatic heroines of the period, and culminating in a surprisingly pessimistic register that finally breaks free, or at least cleverly nuances, Kipling's original.