Summary
In a sun-scorched Andalusian outpost where the air tastes of iron and oleander, Lolette—half-feral, half-siren—spins through the dust like a crimson top, her ankles chiming with tiny coins that double as alibis. Every man in Juanguera sketches her silhouette on the walls of his mind; the Tiger, a swaggering brigand who wears his ammunition like rosary beads, swears she is the prayer he never learned. Yet Lolette’s gaze bypasses him, landing instead on Maurice Tabor, a Parisian painter whose palette smells of turpentine and exile. She offers him her collarbones as landscape; he offers her nothing but brushstrokes and evasive sighs. When he boards the northbound diligence without her, she simply pockets the Tiger’s blood-warm emeralds—loot from a slit stagecoach—and buys her own one-way horizon. In Montmartre’s gaslit hives, she metastasizes into la belle monstre: flamenco heels crack parquet floors, impresarios duel with fountain pens, and Maurice’s canvases sell faster than absinthe. But Lolette signs five contracts with five different managers, pocketing francs like bullets, and Paris awakens to her exquisite fraud. An arrest warrant blooms on the morning air; Maurice drags her toward the border, yet the Tiger materializes from the pines, hijacks their escape, and chains them in a limestone keep where torches drip shadows shaped like guilt. At the banquet he throws in her honor—ox turning on spit, wine as dark as ecclesiastical velvet—Lolette dances the fandango of last rites, pours the Tiger into unconsciousness, and slips away with the dawn, leaving behind only the echo of castanets and the smell of crushed pomegranate on the stones.
Synopsis
Lolette (Theda Bara), an exotic and spirited peasant girl lives In the small Spanish village of Juanguera. Although ardently courted by the native swains, and particularly a bandit called The Tiger, Lolette prefers Maurice Tabor, a French artist who has come to Juanguera to paint. Because he refuses to take her to Paris, Lolette accepts a gift of stolen jewels from The Tiger and follows Maurice to France. With Lolette as his model, Maurice paints brilliantly, and soon she becomes a Paris sensation. One evening, Lolette performs a Spanish dance on stage, and the next day, she signs contracts with a number of impresarios, accepting advance payment from all of them. Fearing her arrest, Maurice urges her to accompany him back to Spain, but The Tiger attacks their coach and imprisons them. At a feast held in her honor, however, Lolette urges The Tiger to drink, and when he is unconscious, she and Maurice escape.
