Jon Mirsalis on Piano A Fool There Was gave the word "vamp" to the English language. As the incarnation of this aggressive variety of the femme fatale, Theda Bara became famous overnight. This "circumspect and demure" girl was given out to be half-Arab, a seeress and inscrutably but frightfully evil. Constantly photographed with skulls and snakes, she was condemned to a career of wickedness through forty subsequent films. Using wiles that may appear absurd to us today, and perhaps as well to much of the 1914 audience, the vamp lures a man from his wife and child, ruins his reputation, and drives him to drink, only one among her victims. In Victorian times she might have been the dark side of the traditional innocent virgin, but in 1914 her aggressiveness could be considered a symptom of the growing need of women to have a degree of power, of whatever kind, in a man's society.-The Museum of Modern Art