Pandora’s Box (no 11)

by Allan Fish

(Germany 1929 132m) DVD1/2

Aka. Der Büchse der Pandora

Don’t bring Lulu

p  George C.Horzetzky, Seymour Nebenzahl  d  Georg W.Pabst  w  Ladislaus Vajda, George W.Pabst  plays  “Erdegeist” and “Pandora’s Box” by Franz Wedekind  ph  Günther Krampf  ed  Joseph R.Flieser  m  Peer Ruben  art  Andrei Andreiev  cos  Göttlieb Hesch

Louise Brooks (Lulu), Fritz Kortner (Dr Peter Schorn), Franz Lederer (Alwa Schorn), Gustav Diessl (Jack the Ripper), Carl Gotz (Schigolch), Alice Roberts (Countess Anna Geschwitz), Daisy D’Ora (Marie de Zarniko), Krafft Raschig (Roderigo Quast), Michael Von Newlinsky (Marquis Casti-Piani), Sig Arno (Stage manager),

Okay, so the tagline is unoriginal, but it’s so apt for this piece.  You may not want to bring this Lulu, but you’re intoxicated with her.  In all her films in Hollywood Louise Brooks seemed restrained, reserved and even, perish the thought, uninteresting.  Yet German director Pabst saw enough in her performance in Beggars of Life to warrant bringing her over from Hollywood to star in his long cherished adaptation of Wedekind’s deliciously melodramatic and seedy Lulu plays.  If her performance in the later Diary of a Lost Girl is probably stronger, that film doesn’t remotely resemble what it was originally.  Pandora’s Box, after painstaking restoration, does.  Furthermore, her appearance transcends mere performance, entering that too rarely glimpsed world of being.  She is a force of nature; a force of sexy, immoral, sluttish nature, but a force of nature nonetheless.  She is of course doomed, and Brooks never escaped the role for the rest of her career, but her place in cinema history and in immortality was beyond secure.

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