Alternative Film Guide

Tomorrow evening, (Friday, at 7:30 pm), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will screen the premiere of Theda Bara: The Woman with Hungry Eyes, a documentary directed by Hugh Neely.

Theda Bara was one of the biggest stars of the 1910s, a heavily made-up, slightly pudgy - and totally artificial - representation of the dark side of womanhood as seen through a Victorian prism. Bara’s anti-heroines were women who possessed a voracious sexual appetite, which, of course, led to death and mayhem to all around her. (Appropriately, her name was an anagram for “Arab Death.”)

There had been film “vamps” before Theda Bara (née Theodosia Goodman, in Cincinnati, Ohio), but none before or after managed to capture the filmgoing public’s imagination the way Bara did.

Following the documentary and a chat with director Hugh Neely, LACMA will show the perfectly acceptable 1955 historical melodrama Land of the Pharaohs, directed by Howard Hawks (from a screenplay co-credited to William Faulkner), and starring Jack Hawkins, Joan Collins, and James Robertson Justice.

 

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