Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

17 Theda Bara a different personality and a new type of characterization. Gebhart tional actress, but not a great deal. Any woman with a grain of feeling would react to the atmospheric mood of the scene, complemented with music, and pour out impetuously the desired impulse. It is instinctive. "But in conveying the points of subtle situation comedy, there is little feeling. Every device of technique must be resorted to. "And, by the way hasn't the motion picture gone too far to the extreme of mental acting? This new trend of thought transference on the screen denotes proggress ; but it can be carried too far, to the point of placidity. In so many pictures now the players' faces reflect such a boresome, unvariable sameness. I am not advocating the acting of gesticulation, the old order of arm waving and chest heaving. But I would like a relief from this molding of a face into one phlegmatic cast." There is no need to reintroduce Theda Bara, save to the youngsters coming on. Her characterization in "A Fool There Was," its arro gant sensuality, its superb wicked ness, as wefl as her own odd fascination, created a furore. She became the biggest box-office attraction of the day, and ■her name soon was synonymous with the word vampire. A colorful personality was invented for her ; legends were fabricated to surround her with mystery. True, to the flappers perhaps she is just a name. As I heard one ask, "What's a thedabara? Oh, I see," with withering scorn, when her history had been proclaimed, "something that happened in the Dark Ages. Bet she couldn't throw the hooks into a sheik as Aileen Pringle does." No, she couldn't, on the Pringle technique. But those who buy a ticket to the torrid zone don't expect or desire frigidity. However, the Bara of yesterday is buried, save for the value of her name. "She did her job well," is engraven upon her tombstone by the very smart woman who brought her into being ; and over her grave this woman plans a different campaign to a new victory. I cannot say if Theda Bara has changed, for I did not know her in the days of her sirenic success. But certainly this woman with her tactful social grace and her delicious sense of humor, who permits you to glimpse a shrewd showmanship under this surface charm, bears little kinship to the screen Bara of yesterday. She insists that the years have molded her into a new character. "Those legends designed to make me mysterious in the public eye were inventions — and my own," she confessed. I wish they would stop giving the press agents credit for their f abrication. Realizing that I represented a public symbol of exotic and mystic wickedness, I worried myself into headaches concocting stories to perpetuate that illusion. "However, imaginative glamour though a 1 1 that was, I did live in a dream world which was far more genuine to me than the realities. Music, book s, contact with very strong i n d i v i d u alities, with minds seeking the truth of human problems, psychological study — these made up my life, singularly unlike the average girl's. Marriage was a jar in that it awakened me from my self-absorption, brought into my vision the actualities that I had ignored, preferring to think that I belonged upon a higher mental plane. I came out of my trance. "And I have had hours of bitterness, when my efforts to return to pictures met snags. Criticism I had regarded as publicity, but the 'Unfair treatment to which I was subjected when I made unwise contractual connections put me into the dumps." The failure of her hopes time and again, the merely mediocre success of her stage play, "The Blue Flame," her marriage to Charles Brabin, which brought with its general contentment those adjustments that accompany the union of two individual temperaments, the contacts encountered in her travels, the prosaic Continued on page 114 Photo by Melbourne Spurr The years have made little change in Theda Bara's appearance, but she insists that they have molded her into a new character.