46. Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1929)

Directed By G. W. Pabst

Synopsis

Lulu is a high class man's lady, to what point she is an actual prostitute at the beggining of the film is not clear. She marries, kills husband by accident, runs away with husband's son. Runs away to London, street walks and gets killed by Jack the Ripper.

Review

This was an interesting and pretty progressive theme. The camera work standard is what we are now used to, nothing too fancy, but some camera movement and beautiful lighting. Where the film shines however is in its characters and plot. Louise Brooks is amazing as Lulu, she exudes sensuality and the secondary characters are equally interesting. There's her father/ first client/ first pimp (you are never sure), the lesbian countess who is in love with her, her rich costumer who marries her, his sone who loves her and even Jack the Ripper.

The main attraction here is Louise Brooks however, and that alone is worth the ticket. She is a very good actress and has a great character, a Madonna-whore who is at the same time joyous, damaged, beautiful, fragile and ultimately destructive to all who surround her. Ideal woman, then. And she pulls it off terribly well.

The settings in the film are equally amazing as is the wardrobe, which showcases Louise Brooks to perfection. From her beautiful evening dresses, to the widow's gown with a fantastic veil and even in her dead husband's bathrobe she is tantalising. And that is actually an essential part of the plot and the point of the film, it is not just me drooling, but all men and women in the film itself. And that is where her unwilling destructiveness comes into play. All who surround her are destroyed by her, directly or indirectly. In the end only Jack the Ripper is even more damaged and destructive, killing her.

Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Rediscovery

French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo (Henri Langlois: "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!") as a film icon, much to her amusement, but it would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982. She was famously profiled by the noted film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, "The Girl With The Black Helmet", the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob, worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over.

She rarely gave interviews, but had a special relationship with John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow, the film historians, and they were able to capture on paper some of her amazing personality. Running 50 minutes, Lulu in Berlin (1984) is a rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll in the year before her death. She had lived alone by choice for many years, and Louise died from a heart attack in 1985, after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years.

A continuing inspiration

Louise is considered one of the first naturalistic actors in film, her acting being subtle and nuanced compared to many other silent performers. The close-up was just coming into vogue with directors, and Louise's almost hypnotically beautiful face was perfect for this new technique. Louise had always been very self-directed, even difficult, and was notorious for her salty language, which she didn't hesitate to use whenever she felt like it. In addition, she had made a vow to herself never to smile on stage unless she felt compelled to, and although the majority of her publicity photos show her with a neutral expression, she had a dazzling smile. By her own admission, she was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to experiment, even posing nude for "art" photography, and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation.

Louise Brooks as an unattainable film image served as an inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his classic science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image. In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies." Elements of The Invention of Morel, minus the science fictional hardware, served as a basis for Alain Resnais' enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad (1961), one of the most influential films of the 1960s.

In 1987, the first book devoted to Louise, "Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star", by Rolland Jaccard, was published in France. Soon after, in 1989, Barry Paris wrote the definitive biography, "Louise Brooks", an exhaustively researched book hailed as a model for film biographies, and was an uncompromising look at Louise's life and times.

Louise also had an influence in the graphics world - she had the distinction of inspiring two separate comics: the long-running "Dixie Dugan" newspaper strip by John H. Striebel that started in the late 1920's and ran until 1966, which grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, "Show Girl", that writer J.P. McEvoy had loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway; and the erotic comic books of "Valentina", by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comic artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.

In 1991, the synth-pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released "Pandora's Box (It's a Long, Long Way)", and the collage-pop band Soul Coughing released "St. Louise Is Listening" in 1998, both inspired by Louise Brooks' life. She continues to inspire other musicians and there are more than a few references to her in current popular music.

The 1986 film Something Wild, directed by Jonathan Demme, features a main character played by actress Melanie Griffith, who sports Louise Brooks' trademark hairstyle, and goes by the moniker Lulu. She is a very free spirited character, obviously inspired by Brooks personality.

A documentary, Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu, was broadcast in 1998 on the Turner Classic Movies network. Narrated by Shirley MacLaine, the program gained the actress a whole new legion of fans.

In the late 1990s, BBC Books based their description of the third incarnation of Doctor Who character Romana on Louise Brooks. The rock band Marillion also have a song inspired by her. 'Interior Lulu' appeared on their 1999 album Marillion.com