User Reviews

In this semi-melodrama 'The Spider', both of the principal female roles are played by Pauline Frederick. However, there seems to be no reason for this dual casting except sheer vanity on Frederick's part, or an urge (like Shakespeare's Nick Bottom) to play all the parts. At no time in 'The Spider' does either of the two principal females impersonate the other, nor get mistaken for the other; their strong physical resemblance is simply down to the fact that they're played by the same actress, and she isn't very protean. Also, because this film's producer (Daniel Frohman) was either too mean or too skint to pay for double-exposure photography, at no point in this movie do we ever see both versions of Pauline Frederick on screen in the same shot. The casting gimmick is simply her ego trip.

Anyroad, haughty hussy Valerie St Cyr (Pauline Frederick, wearing her own hair) starts out as the wife of a poor violinist. She leaves him -- I had difficulty believing she ever would have married him in the first place -- and she scarpers off to Paris, where she swiftly becomes the mistress of the Count Du Poissy.

Meanwhile, the lowly flower girl Joan Marche (Pauline Frederick, wearing a dodgy wig) is in love with handsome painter Julian St Saens, who apparently doesn't realise that with a name like St Saens he ought to be a composer, not a painter. Thomas Holding (who?), the actor who plays St Saens, gives such an incredibly inept performance that I feel uncomfortable calling him an actor.

Valerie St Cyr is attracted to Julian St Saens, for no discernible reason other than the fact that they've both got saintly surnames. She wants St Saens to paint her portrait, but he pointedly tells her (in an intertitle) that he only paints 'gentlewomen'.

SPOILERS NOW, and good riddance. Even though the Count has Valerie for his mistress, he tries to seduce Joan ... clearly recognising that they're two separate women, mind you, even though they're both played by the same actress. Joan stabs the Count fatally. He goes down for the count, but Valerie (in a twist of fate that's not twisted enough) ends up charged with his murder and she goes to the guillotine. So, even though she never loved him, I guess she lost her head for him.

This turgid mellerdrammer is the sort of tosh that gave silent films a bad name. I'll rate 'The Spider' just 2 points out of 10. The film's title refers to Valerie St Cyr's predatory personality.