A Fool There Was (1915)

Directed by

Frank Powell

Genre

drama film, silent film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 07m

Rated

NR

Rating

5.0 of 10 from 33 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A wealthy man falls under the spell of a seductive woman who uses her charm to ruin him. The film follows his moral and social decline as the woman known as a vamp drains his vitality and reputation.

silent-eramelodramaticsensualmorally-ambiguousslow-pacedatmosphericdatedcampy

What happens

A Fool There Was is a 1915 American silent drama film produced by William Fox, directed by Frank Powell, and starring Theda Bara. Upon release, the film was long considered controversial for such risqué intertitle cards as "Kiss me, my fool!" A Fool There Was is one of the few extant films featuring Theda Bara. It popularised the word vamp (short for vampire), which describes a femme fatale who causes the moral degradation of those she seduces, first fascinating and then exhausting her victims. In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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