Pandora's Box (1929)
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Silent
wmcclain — 3 years ago(April 05, 2023 12:24 PM)
Pandora's Box (1929)
, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst.
I was only vaguely aware of Louise Brooks, a silent film beauty with a brief career who people often confuse with the roles she played, and maybe with good reason. She sometimes has a striking resemblance to later actress Isabella Rossellini:
We drop into the story and try to catch up: she is a "mistress", a kept woman whose distinguished client is about to marry someone more acceptable. Maybe that won't be allowed to happen and we will have a different wedding. Then death, trial, jail break, flight, suffering in wintry London and a final tragic scene with a character credited as "Jack the Ripper".
Plenty of business to watch and the actors are all fine, but Brooks is the shining light, a woman of sexual freedom with a slim dancer's body and inviting smile that makes all the men around her feel special. She even stops the prosecutor at her trial for a moment, even as he understands what she's doing.
We have a lesbian character, sympathetically treated, who also loves Lulu. The actress didn't want to do it so she is a repressed lesbian, which heightens the drama.
The film was not well-received at the time, partly because it was a big silent effort just as talkies were coming in. Audiences probably didn't warm to the story: we try to figure out these people, watching them without ever really knowing them. Lulu lives in the moment and seems to have no calculation, so we see only her surface.
It was rediscovered decades later and Brooks became a film icon, the beautiful sexy Kansas girl in a German film that winds up in London. Google for her nude poses.
Criterion DVD. They provide four scores: an interpretation of what audiences at the time might have heard, something they call "cabaret-style", a more modern interpretation, and a piano improvisation.
This is a fascinating experiment: each score gives you an entirely different movie. I cycled between them all every few minutes. Each seemed "best" at different moments.
We also have an academic track by two film scholars. This film, Louise Brooks, and Weimar cinema have been intensively studied for decades and the weight of theory becomes oppressive. This is too deep into the LitCrit weeds for me.
Capsule film reviews:
Strange Picture Scroll -
unex — 3 years ago(April 05, 2023 11:13 PM)
I liked this movie. It's much better than the other one she made with Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl, which seemed lifeless to me although it does have Fritz Rasp who is always good.
One of those DVDs has a short film she did for Fatty Arbuckle, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, after his career was basically dead. She said somewhere that he was a mess, mostly drunk and unresponsive. Pretty sad. -
phantomparticle — 3 years ago(April 06, 2023 12:01 AM)
I liked this movie. It's much better than the other one she made with Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl, which seemed lifeless to me although it does have Fritz Rasp who is always good.
I haven't seen Pandora's Box in ages, but I have a very good copy of Diary of a Lost Girl from the internet.
Rasp was an excellent villain, not sure if he could have been convincing as anything else.
Fritz Lang knew his value and used him in Metropolis and The Woman in the Moon. The actor had a long and successful career and was still working when he died in 1976. I'm particularly interested in The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which he played Stapleton (1929) and Barrymore (1937). He worked exclusively in Germany (according to his IMDB credits) which makes his films difficult to track down, and I doubt many of them have been translated into English.
A rare look at the young and debonaire Rasp.
Late in life and looking quite amiable.
And This, Too, Shall Pass Away