Book Review - Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara - Eve Golden

 

* The audio version of this will appear in either the September or October 2022 of the book review Podcast series ‘Reading in Bed’ – available from all of the usual networks including readinginbed.bandcamp.com

Blurb:

Theda Bara became an overnight superstar with her film debut in the scandalous 1915 hit, A Fool There Was, and for the rest of that decade stayed at the top of the heap, along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Despite her fame and notoriety as the movies' first "sex symbol," no biography of the original Vamp has ever been written, even though Bara threatened to pen her own "because nobody ever wrote a true word about me." Finally, someone has. Bara had one of the most bizarre and colorful careers of the silent era, starring in Cleopatra, Salome, and scores of other hit films before vanishing mysteriously from the screen. Now, read for the first time how a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest became "Satan's Handmaiden," scandalized a nation, and abruptly fell from the height.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

First of all, the term Vamp hasn’t always being referred to Vampires like Dracula and whatever but for the spell during the 1910s at the birth of cinema in Hollywood where a Vamp was very fashionable for a time is and is a character deemed on Wikepida as “of a mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps. She is an archetype of literature and art. Her ability to enchant, entice and hypnotize her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as verging on supernatural”

Theda Bara Bwas one of the more popular actresses of the silent era and one of cinema's early sex symbols primarily active between 1914 and 1919 where she filmed over 40 films, sadly only a few surviving to this day.

This book must have being a tricky book to research about Ms Bara about there is so little surviving of her work and all of the studio publicity for example billing her as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor. They claimed she had spent her early years in the Sahara Desert under the shadow of the Sphinx, then moved to France to become a stage actress. Her life of course was nothing like that and almost boring.

This must have been a difficult book to research as we have so little of her suriving and to make this book I suspect would have took the Author months of research from often limited information to make this book.

Is it a success as a book? Well, yes and no if I am honest as the Author does a good rather than great recreation showing the Ms Bara was a somewhat opposite of her film persona certainly showing a somewhat quieter lifestyle than what the studios said and more normal if that is the right word.

The one problem I have with this book is the summarising of films which are lost which she seems to have a dislike off despite the fact they are lost. It would have being cool to have all of these films available but to draw conclusions from without being able to see the film is a tricky one and something I am not 100% at ease with and while I did enjoy the book, I do think Episode 17 of Karina Longworth’s essential Podcast series ‘You must remember this’ is better than this book.

7/10