Tweet Lost Vamp Films You Wish You Could See

and why.

Mine, all the films with Virginia Pearson. I believe she created the role originally on Broadway
in "A Fool There Was," even though this is not widely known. I could be wrong about this,
if there were other major "Vamp-focused" plays before that.

[silentfilm]

A lot of Theda Bara films, such as Romeo and Juliet (1916), although technically she was not a vamp in this one. Cleopatra of course.


Harry Hillard and Theda Bara in Romeo and Juliet.

And Kathleen Mavourneen (1919)

and why.

Mine, all the films with Virginia Pearson. I believe she created the role originally on Broadway
in "A Fool There Was," even though this is not widely known. I could be wrong about this,
if there were other major "Vamp-focused" plays before that.

Most of Nita Naldi's films.

They just don't make em like this anymore:

The Turn of the Road (1915)

"A trusting young wife (Naomi Childers) has an old friend (Virginia Pearson) come to visit. Anyone who knows a bit about stars of the 1910s can guess the rest, as Miss Pearson had a reputation for playing vamp roles -the husband (Joseph Kilgour) becomes infatuated with her. Since the wife is busy taking care of her son (Bobby Connelly) she is completely oblivious to all this, even when the pair decide to elope. But as they are on their way, their car gets in an accident and the mistress is badly injured. The forgiving wife allows her to convalesce in her home, and the husband comes to realize what a prize his wife is, so he sticks with her."

From:

http://www.allmovie.com/movie/turn-of-the-road-v114668

I'm coming into this interesting thing that I'm sure many of you
have experienced before: false statements by journalists who
probably only had a passing interest in silent films. The inaccuracies
are probably due to the fact that silents were not very popular
20 or 30 years ago or more when much of this information was
written. The error that I'm referring to was that Virginia Pearson
was typecast in many vamp roles. When you look at her filmography,
there seem to only be a few vamp roles in the 50 titles she made.
So, there is the error that she was a Bara imitator when in fact
she created the role in 1909 on Broadway, and then that she was
typecast as a Vamp, when in fact she appeared in two later roles
in films with Chaney.