The NFR Project #47: 'A Fool There Was'

A Fool There Was

Dir: Frank Powell (uncred.)

Prod: Frank Powell, William Fox (latter uncred.)

Scr: Porter Emerson Browne

Phot: Roy L. McCardell

Premiere: January 12, 1915

67 mins.

  

She was a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati. Who knew she’d end up as the movies’ original sex symbol?

Theodosia Goodman moved to New York City in 1908 and started acting. Soon she was appearing in the primitive silent films being made on the East Coast in addition to her work on Broadway. In only her second film, A Fool There Was, she became a national star.

This was due in large part to the manufacture and marketing of a fake persona for her by Fox Studios. She was renamed Theda Bara, and given a long and ridiculously exotic biography – an off-screen script they expected her to keep to, for the sake of promotion. She did, and she took on the mantle of the dark-eyed, vaguely foreign seductress and ruiner of men, the “vampire.”

The femme fatale, the mysterious and seductive woman who destroys men’s lives, is an archetype as old as Lilith and Helen of Troy. In the Romantic era, poet John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“Beautiful, Pitiless Woman”) reintroduced the idea of the type. His poem ties back directly to Celtic tales of malevolent and covetous female fairies, such as in “Tam Lin.”

Meanwhile, the concept of the vampire was working its way into English culture. After john William Polidori published The Vampyre in 1819, other works such as Rymer and Prest’s serialized, 667,000-word, 1845-1847 epic Varney the Vampire made the word a household one.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897, as was Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire.” With Kipling, you must take the bad with the good. He’s a great storyteller and has a way with words, but he was an imperialist, colonialist, condescending, anti-Semite, misogynist racist, to say nothing of his penmanship. “The Vampire” stigmatizes the female sex as ungrateful, oblivious, and exploitive towards men, who seem to give all for them and get nothing in return. OK.

“A FOOL there was and he made his prayer

(Even as you and I!)

To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair

(We called her the woman who did not care)

But the fool he called her his lady fair—

(Even as you and I!)

Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste

And the work of our head and hand

Belong to the woman who did not know

(And now we know that she never could know)

And did not understand!

And so on. It may the first country song written by an Englishman.

Or course, in melodramas of the day, the temptress was as present as ever, a distaff counterpart to the male cad and bounder who trampled women’s hearts willy-nilly. The “vampire” type picked up the moniker from the poem, and soon “vamps” were seen as female, and sexual, vampires. Inspired by Kipling’s poem, playwright Porter Emerson Browne saw A Fool There Was hit Broadway in 1909. Soon the film industry, digging through the scripts of stage successes, got Browne to adapt his own play for the screen.

In the repressed society of the time, a woman who publicly acknowledged even the existence of sex was deemed a whore, or worse. A vamp was a homewrecker, a free and easy woman, a hussy who made safely married men lose their minds with lust -- who threatened the sanctity of the American home. Just as the early male sex symbols, vamps were “foreign,” with dark hair and Eurasian features. This “otherness” would be alternately condemned and fetishized by American film and culture down to the present day.

Theodosia Goodman was blonde, but Theda Bara had raven tresses. Her pleasant Mitteleuropean features were sharpened and darkened with makeup, her eyes rimmed by deep pools of kohl. She almost resembles the long-haired, white-faced, vengeful yurai of Japanese folklore and horror film.

She certainly doesn’t play a pleasant character. In this feature, which proudly calls itself “a psychological drama” (more marketing; Freud’s 1909 lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University became a media sensation, and the psychoanalytic movement became an American craze), she’s imperious, selfish, and cruel. She is beautiful, pale, and willowy. She’s dressed fashionably, but she’s not noticeably sensual. The viewer must assume that she gratifies her prey in ways not fit to be screened.

Alone with her latest victim in her den of iniquity, her long black hair is undone and her nightdress in a state of dishabille, Bara is, literally, a “loose” woman. (Her manservant is Asian, connoting – what? His inscrutability a cliché that reinforces hers.) Having burned out her latest lover, who is now a shambling, drunken imbecile, Bara, never given a name but known only as “The Vampire,” sets her sights on family man, diplomat, and all-round good guy John Schuyler.

Bara is inadvertently snubbed by Schuyler’s wife, and snarls, “Someday you will regret that!” Later that evening, Schuyler and his family watch the sun set into the Atlantic Ocean (a neat trick as this film was shot in Florida.) as a slow iris contracts on their “the sunset of happiness.”

Fortunately for her, he must sail off to Europe on business and can’t take his wife and adorable fair-haired child. She books passage on the same ship. (On the sidewalk in front of the dock, she bumps into a beggar who is yet another of her victims. There seems to be battalions of them.) Her spurned lover pursues her on board, then shoots himself, which she takes quite well.

Off they sail. She drops her bouquet, which the gallant Schuyler retrieves, pausing to examine her artfully revealed . . . ankles. O sin!

The next thing you know, they are both lying asleep, draped across an upholstered fainting couch in the middle of a field, surrounded by potted plants and drinking liqueurs, which I guess is the typical aftermath of casual sex in 1915.

Schuyler’s friends shun him, and he undergoes a Rake’s Progress as we cut back periodically to see his family getting on without him. In fact, Bara largely fades out of the picture here as it focuses on Schuyler’s downfall. Bara is a catalyst, not a character. (It takes a while for his male friends to tell his wife the truth. She states, fairly enough, “You men shield each other’s shameful sins; but, were it a woman at fault, how quick you’d be to expose and condemn her!”

A Fool There Was is a cautionary tale for the moralists, with just enough sexiness to keep everyone else awake. It stays resolutely downbeat. After giving her husband chance after chance, his long-suffering spouse hauls in the ringer – she brings their golden-coiffed little daughter to beckon him home. They hug; they sob. But NOT EVEN SHE can overcome the evidently incredible power of Bara’s vagina. The vampire enters the room and summons Schuyler, who promptly and drooling, drops his kid and clutches Bara’s breast.

Spoiler alert: Schuyler dies, and Bara enters the room, and crumbles rose petals onto his dead face. That bitch.

Bara would make 44 films, all but six of which are lost. She got married and retired, never making a sound film. But her brief appearance cemented the archetype of the Jebel in American film. She embodies the transition between the decadent figures of Aubrey Beardsley to contemporary Goth girls. From Sadie Thompson to the Woman from the City in Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans, to the gallery of film noir anti-heroines, to Alex in Fatal Attraction, it’s still with us.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: the original vamp, Theda Bara, in ‘The Italian.’

The NFR Project #46: 'Fatty's Tintype Tangle'

Fatty gets a dressing-down in 'Fatty's Tintype Tangle.'

Fatty’s Tintype Tangle

Dir: Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle

Prod: Mack Sennett (uncred.)

Scr: Unknown

Phot: Unknown

Premiere: July 14, 1915

27:38

Roscoe Arbuckle weighed 13 pounds at birth, destroying his mother’s health and contributing to her premature death 12 years later. His father suspected that he was the son of another man. Lesser things have driven people into a need for the plaudits of show business.

He had a divine singing voice, but his comic talents brought him to the fore. Like many large comic performers (Oliver Hardy, Jackie Gleason), he was light on his feet and capable of unexpected acrobatics. He became a wow in the field of vaudeville on the West Coast, and jumped into moving pictures at just the right time.

D.W. Griffith shot the first feature-film footage in Los Angeles in 1910. The forgiving climate, the laid-back atmosphere, and the distance from the litigious Thomas Edison, who didn’t want anyone infringing on his film patents, made it a natural destination for budding and/or independent film production companies. Twenty-five percent of the industry moved West immediately.

Mack Sennett was part of that movement. At 32 years of age, he built Keystone Studio and began literally cranking out slapstick comedies. By the following year, he had three hot properties: comedienne Mabel Normand, the Keystone Cops, and Fatty Arbuckle. For the next eight years, Arbuckle was in the leading rank of movie clowns. He mentored Charlie Chaplin; he discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.

“Fatty’s Tintype Tangle” is typical of Arbuckle’s work. Here he plays a henpecked husband who literally waits like Cinderella on his wife and nagging stepmother. The idea of a fat man being effeminate is reinforced by his somewhat inept execution of kitchen duties (though he is graceful with a spatula and a pancake), and the sarcastic curtsey he executes when summoned. He is a “gentle man,” meaning gentled, pacified. He is more of a grown-up adolescent, what used to be referred to as a scamp. It’s an appealing comic persona, an epicene Everyman.

Forced to give his mother-in-law a good-morning peck on the cheek, he crams spoonsful of sugar into his mouth. After taking a few hits off the jug in the kitchen, he becomes rebellious and aggressive, which backfires on him. On one disturbing level he’s a baby-man; a toddler who messes his clothes, hands, and face with food, drink, and other substances. Fatty makes a mess, breaking dishes in a tantrum and eventually eating a plate, eventually and clumsily asserting his manhood and leaving.

The plot is convoluted and farcical. Fatty accidentally has a compromising photo taken of himself and a strange woman in the park. (The photo is the tintype of the title – a positive print made on an emulsion-coated, thin sheet of metal, which could be developed in minutes, making it the “instant” photography of its day. It was used primarily by itinerant photographers at carnivals and fairs, and was already an anachronism at the time this film was made.)

The woman’s husband threatens him, and Fatty tries to leave town. The woman and her husband, portrayed as uncouth rues from Alaska (?), are looking for lodgings, and Fatty’s wife rents out their rooms to them. Fatty returns home, all parties, converge, and complications ensue.

Many of the standard gags are here – Fatty slips on a banana peel, a first for this survey. A man is knocked onto a moving streetcar via reverse on-screen motion. There is comic jousting and gunplay. The Keystone Cops are cut into the film, but they never actually interact with nay of the principals, so it’s likely unrelated footage of them that was thrown in out of context, as a crowd-pleaser. The highlight is some wire work – in evading the jealous husband, Fatty does some acrobatics on elastic bands made to look like telephone wires two stories above the ground in what looks like unfaked footage. After a double fall into a rain barrel as an excuse to do some underwater gagging, the two men are hauled out by their respective wives and the film comes to a harmonious if abrupt end.

The jealous husband is played by none other than the up-and-coming comic actor Edgar Kennedy. A former boxer (he went 14 rounds with Dempsey), he joined Keystone as one of the original Cops, growing into a supporting player known as “The King of the Slow Burn.” Here Kennedy is functional, displaying a flash of his superior mugging when he thinks for a moment he’s killed Fatty.

Kennedy was the paramount purveyor of frustration. In more than 500 films, he played grumpy cops, judges, tradesmen, homeowners, and my favorite, “An Innocent Bystander.” His long slow takes to the camera, usually accompanied by a pulling down of hand across the face or a perplexed drumming of fingers on his own noggin, are best remembered from later Laurel and Hardy outings, and the hapless lemonade vendor in the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup.”

Interesting and overlooked, he made more than 100 “Average Man” short subjects over a 17-year period for RKO. Kennedy was the centerpiece of an ongoing domestic comedy that foreshadowed the situation comedy of radio’s “Life of Reilly” and TV’s “The Honeymooners.”

In 1921, a death at a party hosted by Arbuckle led to rape and murder charges against him. After three highly publicized trials, he was acquitted – but it was too late. His career was ruined, and many of his films were destroyed by the studios, who couldn’t see why anyone would want to ever see them again. He made 154 films before the scandal; he made 11 after. He died in 1933, at the age of 46. Great contemporary comic actors such as John Candy, John Belushi, and Chris Farley all expressed interest in playing Arbuckle in a film biography; all three died tragically young before it could happen.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: the original vamp, Theda Bara, in ‘A Fool There Was.’

The NFR Project #45: 'The Cheat'

Fannie Ward and Sessue Hayakawa in 'The Cheat.'

The Cheat

Dir: Cecil B. DeMille (uncred.)

Prod: DeMille, Jesse L. Lasky (uncred.)

Scr: Hector Turnbull, Jeanie Macpherson

Phot: Alvin Wycoff

Premiere: December 13, 1915

59 min.

  

From the start, Sessue Hayakawa was under the gun. The son of a powerful Japanese official, he intended to join the military, but a ruptured eardrum prevented him, after he dove too deeply on a dare. His shame led him to attempt suicide. After his recovery, it was decided he would become a banker, so in 1911 he was sent to the University of Chicago for studies.

After two years, he decided to quit school and return home. While waiting for a ship in San Francisco, he joined an amateur theatrical, The Typhoon. Producer Thomas Ince, always on the lookout for material to adapt, offered to make a film out of the production. It was a hit, and Hayakawa was a hot property, an early star who made ungodly amounts of money playing the prototypes of film’s “exotic” lovers and Oriental villains.

Hayakawa was charismatic, and a quiet and controlled actor. His underplaying (he later became a Zen priest, and cited its influence as a factor in his subdued acting) was perfect for film, and had a bit of impact in the transition from stage acting to a toned-down, more naturalistic acting style in film.

Nonetheless, he was chained to stereotypes. His work was despised and even banned in Japan, where it was felt he was reinforcing prejudices. He was hugely popular in America, but despite his stardom, the laws of the day wouldn’t allow him to become an American citizen and marry outside his “race.” He was a human place marker for the Other in American film culture. (He turned down the lead in 1921’s The Sheik, thereby making the career of the then-obscure Rudolph Valentino, who then became the stereotypical “Latin lover.”)

The Cheat could be a standard melodrama – the Asian villain is the only fresh element of a stale tale. The cheat of the title is Edith Hardy, the flight wife of hard-working stockbroker Richard. She spends his money as fast as he makes it, and seems to be perpetually dressed like a decorative top or Dresden doll. When she finds herself in a financial jam (she speculates on the market with the Red Cross funds!), one of her wealthy society friends Hishuru Tori offers to help her out – for a price (wink, wink).

When Edith tries to return his borrowed money to him, an enraged Tori tries to have his way with her, as they used to say. When she resists past the point of his tolerance, he grapples her and thrusts the burning, red-hot metal stamp bearing his seal into her shoulder. Gadzooks! She shoots him in the shoulder.

Fortunately, her suspicious husband is close behind, and Tori’s doors are made of rice paper. He bursts into the room, and quickly takes responsibility for the shooting. An extravagant amount of suffering goes on for a time save for the imperturbable Tori, who sullenly smokes with his arm in a sling.

Of course, Richard goes on trial for shooting Tori, and in a sweeping climax Edith leaps to her feet, confesses all, and bares the insidious mark on her scapula. Pandemonium erupts, as all the right-thinking people watching the trial spring to their feet as one and become a lynch mob hot for Tori’s blood. The verdict is set aside, and husband and wife embrace.

Clearly, insufferable Edith to blame for all that ensues here, but in keeping with American melodrama and racism, the villainy is projected onto the Other. As Tori, Hayakawa is scornful, haughty, untrustworthy, lustful, sly, mysterious, and grim – all qualities ascribed to any despised minority. When he is provoked, a sadistic streaks manifests itself – a kind of “barbaric” behavior that illustrates the idea that Asians are not quite human. His branding of Edith is like his branding of his collectibles earlier – “That means it belongs to me,” he says in intertitle – reduces her to an object, if not more accurately livestock.

But is the salvation much better? Throughout the film, Richard treats Edith like a silly, wayward child, which is disturbing when you remember that they are playing grown-up, married characters. Is it better for a woman to be treated like a slow child or an object? This no-win situation has not improved much in cinema down the decades.

The brisk story is expertly directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who made a splash the previous year with his rookie effort The Squaw Man, the first feature film to be made in Hollywood. (To show you the pace of production in early Hollywood, The Cheat was DeMille’s 23^rd film in less than a year.) DeMille had much experience in theater under such top impresarios of the day as Charles Frohman and David Belasco. DeMille’s solid visual sense makes maximum use of silhouette and shadow, key lighting, close-ups, and pacing to create and effective and entertaining story. This quality, linked to others and harnessed to bigger and bigger extravaganzas, soon made DeMille the most successful producer-director of his era.

The racism is unfeigned and palpable. Complaints from the Japanese-American population led the villain’s identity being changed for the 1918 re-release. Instead of a Japanese person, Haka Arakau, a “Burmese ivory king” (presumably there was an insufficient amount of Burmese-Americans to be concerned about). Despite this distinction, the cultural damage is the same.

The phrase in the air at the time was “Yellow Peril,” a fear of Asian immigrants’ “invasion” (sound familiar?) common to Western culture but seeing its most intense manifestation in xenophobic America. It was encoded in prejudicial laws, immigration restrictions, and mob violence. Anti-Asian portrayals and caricatures continued at least until 1961, when Mickey Rooney’s “yellowface” performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s became the proverbial straw.

So did Hayakawa help or hinder Asian perceptions? He used his profits not only to live lavishly but to form his own independent film production company, and made 32 films in four years, Asian-American films that attempted to get beyond Asian stereotypes. They failed.

He became a journeyman artist. Trapped inadvertently in France when the Nazis invaded, he promptly joined the French underground. He gave an Oscar-nominated performance as Colonel Saito in Lean’s great 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai, then retired and focused on business and spiritual matters. He wrote, he painted, and he lived. He was quite a Renaissance man. Only lately are we able to see the man through the mas of contradictions he endured.

The NFR Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: ‘Fatty’s Tintype Tangle.’