Pandora’s Box (1929) Dare You Open, or Will You Pabst? (Review)

Achieving its UK Blu-ray debut this week courtesy of Eureka Entertainment’s “Masters of Cinema” series is G.W. Pabst’s 1929 classic Pandora’s Box. Arguably one of Weimer German cinema’s – if not silent cinema in general’s – greatest masterpieces, Pandora’s Box is the film that catapulted the Kansas-born, twenty-two-year-old, one-time chorus girl Louise Brooks into everlasting celluloid superstardom.

Based on two fin de siècle plays by German playwright Frank Wedekind (Earth Spirit and the titular Pandora’s Box), and as with Wedekind’s plays, Pabst’s movie tells the story of Lulu – a sex worker whose free spirit and beauty leaves chaos and turmoil in its wake. On her wedding night, her sugar-daddy bridegroom, newspaper editor Dr Schon (Fritz Kortner), is fatally shot during a jealousy-fuelled physical struggle. During the subsequent murder trial, the prosecuting counsel draws the comparison between Lulu’s wanton sexuality and the Greek legend.

The prosecutor proclaims “The Greek gods created a woman – Pandora. She was beautiful and charming and versed in the art of flattery. But the gods also gave her a box containing all the evils of the world. The heedless woman opened the box, and all evil was loosed upon us”. After escaping justice with Alwa (Francis Lederer) – the infatuated son of her late husband, and her Dickensian-like pimp Schigolch (Carl Goetz), the trio find that security eludes them, which leads them to London where the notorious Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl), stalks the fog-bound streets on Christmas Eve – and a tragic date with destiny.

Wedekind’s original bitter satires of sexual mores and bourgeoisie morality has long since been superceded by Pabst’s movie, which doesn’t so much adapt the source material as reimagine it. For Wedekind, Lulu was nothing more than a primitive siren that lured all men to their doom, but Pabst’s vision adds some much needed three-dimensionality and depth by removing the play’s caustic moralising to produce something more cinematically rewarding – and empathetic.

With his ingénue and muse Brooks, he creates a Lulu that is at once both naive and fiercely shrewd, her tragedy being her sex appeal and how, under the creepy tutelage of her first ‘patron’ – the wizened and alcoholic Schigolch – it has been routinely mined and abused since childhood. Pabst argues that it is the evil of men that is chiefly to blame for the narrative he delivers and, as such, Brooks’ Lulu is an innocent whose charms – be they sexual or, as they appear to be later with a price on her head, financial – are all too irresistable for those who find themselves in her orbit. Unable to interpret the consequences of the path she has been firmly placed upon by men since her youth, Lulu walks blindly towards her tragedy in a denouement that transcends cheap melodrama and the cynical, sermonising sense of just desserts.

Unfortunately for Pabst, the critics of the day were appalled at his vision of Wedekind’s works and for the sympathy he showed for Lulu, dismissing Pandora’s Box as nothing more than a travesty of its source material. Ironically, considering that the complaints were that Lulu was no longer “a man-eater devouring her sexual victims”, many held their noses at the scandalous nature of the story and its daring (for the time), depiction of sexuality and female desire. The censors mutilated Pabst’s vision across many countries, cutting the film down from 133 minutes to just 66 and heavily diluting the subplot between Lulu and the masculine-presenting Countess Anna (Alice Roberts), whose love for Lulu is unrequited and leads to her manipulation and eventual abandonment. The original French, UK and US cuts even went so far as to revise the London finale, depicting Lulu seeing the light and joining the Salvation Army, ensuring audiences were sent packing with a happy ending. The knives were also out for Brooks’ performance as, far from celebrating it in the iconic nature we have now come to appreciate, she was scorned as a “non-actress”, and the root of many a German critic’s derision seemed to come from the fact that she was American.

Looking at Pandora’s Box now, it’s absurd to think that the critics couldn’t (or, if xenophobia is to be believed, simply wouldn’t), see how special Louise Brooks was. The claims that she was a “non-actress” are now unmistakably false, her performance being an example of naturalistic acting that earmarked just how pioneering Pabst intended Pandora’s Box to be. Cinemagoers of the day were familiar with theatrical-style performances which were identifiable by – and indeed required – exaggerated facial expressions and body language. Confronted with Pabst’s close-ups of Brooks’ underplaying, audiences and critics assumed that she simply did nothing in front of the camera, when in reality she was breaking the mould for screen acting techniques that continue to this day.

Despite her limited experience, Brooks arrived before Pabst almost fully-formed, and similarities between her and Lulu have long since been remarked upon. As a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, Brooks’ experience of contemporary dance helped to convince in the scenes in which Lulu is first courted by strongman Rodrigo Quast (Krafft-Rasching), to star in his variety act before securing the lead role in Alwa’s musical revue. It also helped bring about a unique working method between the director and his young star, with Pabst effectively choreographing the movement and emotions he wanted from her in each scene.

Having run around in the same circles as William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies in America, and engaged in a wild, romantic relationship with Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, Brooks arrived on set in Germany with a reputation for partying – not unlike that of Lulu’s. It was an image that she couldn’t always shake off, and she later recalled that “(many) on the production, thought I had cast some blinding spell over Pabst that allowed me to walk through my part”. Revealing that the mood within certain quarters of the production was acrimonious, she further remarked on the similarities she felt between herself and the character – “I revered Pabst for his truthful picture of this world of pleasure, which let me play Lulu naturally”, before adding that “The rest of the cast were tempted to rebellion”.

It’s tempting to draw comparisons between Lulu and Brooks’ personal life, her fictional alter ego being a long-standing sex worker who was initiated into the profession as a child, whilst Brooks herself was sexually abused by a neighbour at the age of nine – a crime that, when revealed years later to her mother, garnered no sympathy, only that Brooks “must have led him on”. While Lulu discards the infatuated Countess in arguably her most unsympathetic moment, Brooks herself was no stranger to lesbian love affairs – most notably a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. Pabst himself worried that Brooks’ life would go on to mirror that of Lulu’s, and by the time Brooks retired from the acting profession in the late 1940s and early ’50s, her only source of income was from sex work.

Perhaps the biggest influence that Brooks had upon her character was her easily identifiable and now legendary haircut, and if that sounds like a back-handed compliment, a trivialising of what Brooks brings to the role, that really isn’t my intention. The sleek, black bob wasn’t a character choice or a fashion statement, it was simply how Brooks had always worn her hair since childhood, and this link to that period of her life is important because it taps into the way that Pabst and Brooks perceive Lulu’s charms. Combined with her slender, gamine figure, the hair evokes a kind of childlike androgyny that is arguably what makes her so captivatingly attractive for a certain kind of man – users who are titillated by the regressive personality, while their masculinity is simultaneously reassured that such a personality can be easily dominated.

It’s important to remember that Marlene Dietrich was desperate to play Lulu, and although she was grudgingly Pabst’s second choice should Brooks pass, the celebrated vamp had none of the qualities the director needed or could achieve. Dietrich was simply too aware of her desirability to invoke such childlike naivety, and aside from lacking Brooks’ ability to project both innocence and sexuality, the ‘X’ factor that Brooks brought to the role was her American personality and physicality. Brooks also cared little for the rules of German society or the protocols of its film industry, and looked nothing like her acting rivals there – but by starring in Pandora’s Box, she arguably created an iconic archetypal Art Deco look.

This look has been embraced as wholly European, and is timeless enough to influence the likes of Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), Melanie Griffith in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), Corinne Drewery (vocalist of 1980s sophisticated pop trio Swing Out Sister), and continues to inspire the world of fashion even now, almost a century later. Cinematographer Günther Krampf, a pioneer of German Expressionism, captures her notable look beautifully, contrasting her luminous skin with dark shadows – a light to be snuffed out by the very men who would call themselves her victims.

It was only in the 1950s that Pandora’s Box was rediscovered by film scholars, critics and audiences alike – a reappraisal that greatly benefitted Louise Brooks too. Henri Langlois announced in 1953 that “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!”, and the reclusive film star reinvented herself as a perceptive essayist on cinema, and lived as such until her death in 1985. Contemporary audiences could now see the achievements in Pabst’s movie like its pioneering nature, its open-minded depiction of Lulu’s sexual appetites, and its sympathetic depiction of the lesbian Countess. the bowlderised prints were pieced together to achieve something close to Pabst’s original vision, and in 2009 Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner personally funded a restoration of Pandora’s Box, which was subsequently screened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in 2012. It’s this restoration that Eureka are releasing alongside extras such as a commentary by Pamela Hutchinson, and video essays and appreciations from Kat Ellinger, David Cairns and Fiona Watson. Unavailable to this reviewer is a sixty page booklet featuring new writing from several critics, archive stills and imagery.

Mark’s Archive – Pandora’s Box