The Unchastened Woman (1925) On DVD

Modest housewife Caroline Knollys discovers that she is pregnant. Rushing to tell her husband Hubert, she finds him in the arms of a younger woman. Determined to one day have revenge, she escapes to Europe. Despite having the baby, she transforms herself from housewife to vamp, becoming the most-talked about woman in Venice. Returning to America, she uses the child to blackmail her husband and his mistress. But Caroline finds that her love for Hubert was not as dormant as she thought, and instead decides to use her newly-won confidence to reunite the family.

The Unchastened Woman is one of only three surviving films starring Theda Bara, the silver screen's first sex symbol. She made more than 40 films between 1914 and 1926, but most were destroyed by the 1937 fire that struck the 20th Century Fox storage facility in Little Ferry, New Jersey (The other two surviving Bara films are A Fool There Was from 1915 and East Lynne from 1916). Nicknamed "The Vamp" for her femme fatale roles that inevitably brought male characters to ruin, the exotic-looking Bara was said to be born in the Sahara to an Arab sheik. In actuality, she was born to a Polish family in Cincinnati, Ohio. Regardless, publicists enjoyed emphasizing that her name was an anagram of "Arab death". Eventually tiring of the vamp image, she let her contract with Fox expire in 1919. Without studio support, Bara's career suffered and she did not make another film until small startup company Chadwick Pictures signed her to star in The Unchastened Woman. Not proving to be the comeback she wished for, Bara never starred in another feature, retiring to her former home in Cincinnati.