Pandora's Box (1928)

by Charles Taylor, from The A-List

You can always be certain they'll be an uproar when a foreign actress is chosen to play a character who has come to be regarded as a national heroine. We laugh now at the way Margaret Mitchell fans were appalled that a British actress, Vivien Leigh, had won the role of Scarlett O'Hara, although the same thing happened in Britain when it was announced that American Renče Zellweger had been chosen to play Bridget Jones.

But if those performances (and a far greater one, the Corsican actress Falconetti's in Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc) are any indication, then national heroines should always be played by foreigners.

One of these periodic nationalist brouhahas occurred in the late 1920s when the great German director G.W. Pabst announced that a relatively obscure American actress, Louise Brooks, had been chosen to play that incarnation of Weimar decadence, Lulu, in his adaptation of two plays by Frank Wedekind, Erdgeist and Die buchse der Pandora. Brooks, who walked out of her contract with Paramount to work with Pabst, had been featured in American silents like the Philo Vance mystery The Canary Murder Case and William Wellman's melodrama Beggars of Life but she had never become a big star. In a sense, she was already playing her greatest role: herself.

Years after Brooks had stopped making movies (her last picture was the 1938 John Wayne horse-opera Overland Stage Raiders), the wildly passionate pronouncements of her admirers, the terse bitterness (and self-pity masquerading as hardness) of her periodic writings (collected in the 1982 book Lulu in Hollywood), the list of men she had been involved with (Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and W.C. Fields, among them, and also CBS Chairman William Paley, who kept her for years after their affair ended), and the mystery surrounding her reclusive existence in Rochester, New York, all combined to create the myth of Louise Brooks. It was the myth of the artist too pure for Hollywood chicanery, whose genius was recognized by Europe while she went unheralded in her own country. It took Kenneth Tynan's 1979 New Yorker profile to kick start the vogue for Louise Brooks in America. Europe had succumbed years before. In 1959, Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinematechque Franēaise, flew Brooks across the Atlantic for a showing of Pandora's Box. The Italian cartoonist Guido Creoax used her image for his strip Valentina (as it had been used for the 1920s American strip Dixie Dugan). And movies had been paying homage to Brooks for years. Cyd Charisse, in the "Broadway Melody" number from Singin' in the Rain, and Anna Karina, as the prostitute Nana in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, were just two of the girls who had sported shiny black bobs and straight bangs--"the black helmet," as Tynan called it.

It's very likely that what kept Brooks from being a star in Hollywood was a combination of smarts, an unwillingness to show obedience to the studios, self-destructiveness, and laziness (qualities that all come through in Barry Paris's biography of Brooks). Reading her writings, you're aware of how carefully she has crafted her failure to seem like a triumph: the refusal to play the Hollywood game. And you can balk at that self-mythologization, or at the enthusiastic declarations of her partisans--Henri Langlois: "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!"; Kenneth Tynan: "The only star actress I can imagine either being enslaved by or wanting to enslave"--and still be struck dumb by her presence in Pandora's Box. More than seventy years later, Louise Brooks as Lulu remains the most potent and disturbing erotic presence ever captured on film.

It's no diminishment of Brooks to say that it is as a presence, rather than as an actress, that she makes such an impact. She herself once said, "When I acted, I hadn't the slightest idea of what I was doing. I was simply playing myself, which is the hardest thing in the world to do--if you know that it's hard. I didn't, so it seemed easy. I had nothing to unlearn. When I first worked with Pabst, he was furious, because he approached people intellectually and you couldn't approach me intellectually, because there was nothing to approach." Tynan quotes one Berlin critic of the time as saying "Louise Brooks cannot act. She does not suffer. She does nothing." It's not true, of course. But what Brooks does in Pandora's Box is the exact opposite of what you'd expect from how the part had traditionally been conceived in both Wedekind's plays and in Alban Berg's opera.

The men who become involved with Lulu all meet their doom, but it was Pabst's inspiration not to have his heroine (and she is a heroine) lead them to it. As conceived by Pabst and played by Brooks, Lulu is an innocent with all the amorality that implies. Part of it is Brooks's build. No voluptuous temptress she, Brooks, diminutive and small-breasted, her face clear and open beneath her dark bangs and darker eyes, has the lissome, carefree movements of a dancer. (In fact, she had briefly been a member of the legendary Denishawn Dance Troupe.) It's no accident that, especially in the opening scenes, Pabst portrays Lulu as a child. She cuddles on the lap of Schigolch (the peerlessly corrupt Carl Goetz), the shabby old lecher who was her first lover (and, it's implied, her pimp), as if he were a caring granddaddy. Introduced to Schigolch's friend, the variety show strongman Rodrigo (Krafft-Raschig, she swings from his muscular arm as if it were a jungle gym. In the midst of a quarrel with Schoen (Fritz Kortner, who looks and moves as if he's just eaten a heavy meal that hasn't agreed with him), the rich publisher who is keeping her, she kicks her feet and pouts like a child who hasn't gotten her way.

Living from moment to moment, Lulu responds solely to pleasure. And having been favored with a ray of her thoughtless sensual freedom, the men who fall for her willingly follow a path to their own destruction. She succeeds in getting Schoen to break off his engagement to a sensible, dull girl, and his response is, "This is my execution." It proves to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. On their wedding night, convinced that Lulu will be his ruin, he tries to persuade her to kill herself. The gun goes off, leaving Schoen dead. At her trial, even his ineffectual son Alwa (Franz Lederer) testifies on her behalf. But she's found guilty, and a cordon of admirers effects her escape. What follows is a scene that distills the heedless essence of the character. Returning to Schoen's flat, Lulu enjoys a smoke, fluffs up some pillows to relax with a fashion magazine, and runs a bath. Her murder conviction has become no more than a tiresome appointment from which she's extricated herself, something already forgotten.

The rest of the film follows her flight, with the help of Alwa, Schigolch, and Rodrigo, to a floating casino/bordello in Marseilles and finally to shabby, freezing digs in London. The climax of the film has been best described by Brooks: "It is Christmas Eve and she is about to receive the gift which has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac." Jack the Ripper, to be exact, who appears out of the London fog. Even he is not immune to Lulu's charms.

The critic James Harvey once admiringly characterized the performances in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo as "pure behaving." And that's what we see in Louise Brooks, something so natural and unaffected that we can believe, according to Brooks, that she once answered a clergyman who asked how she felt playing such a girl, "Feel! I felt fine! It all seemed perfectly normal to me."

The performance resonates because of the context Pabst provided his star. Pandora's Box is not so much a reversal of conventional morality as it is another world in which convention and morality do not exist. (The same cannot be said of Pabst and Brooks's follow-up, 1929's Diary of a Lost Girl traditional material that would have been more suited to Griffith and Gish.) It's a world of sexual usury. "Everyone wants my blood--my life," Lulu cries to Schigolch at one desperate point. Nothing has changed; it's just that she's no longer getting anything in the bargain. Perhaps the greatest example of Pabst's complete reversal of expectations occurs in the Christmas Eve scene with Gustav Diesel as Jack the Ripper, which is the tenderest in the movie. It's riven with tension, as we wait for the Ripper to revert to his homicidal ways. But the moments before, as they huddle in Lulu's squalid, ice-cold flat and kiss as he holds a sprig of mistletoe above her head, is the only sexual exchange in the movie where the characters are not trying to get something from their partner.

Lit with a knife-blade precision, the film is told episodically in a stark, jarring Expressionist style, whether we are in the art deco lair of Schoen or the foggy, near-Gothic nighttime exteriors of London. When Pabst is really cooking, as he is in the backstage scenes before Lulu makes her debut in the variety show Schoen is producing, or in the wedding celebration leading up to Schoen's death, the rapid, escalating pace fuses contemporary neurotic anxiety and eroticism. Watch the violence with which Kortner grabs and shakes Brooks (she claimed his fingers left ten bruises on her arms), or the way he appears to be breaking her fingers as he opens her hand to place in it the gun he is offering for her suicide.

For all the fascination with psychology that the film betrays (like the Oedipal conflicts between Schoen and Alwa, and the father-daughter relationship between Lulu and her older patrons), it is, in some basic way, post-Freudian. As with Last Tango in Paris (a far lusher and romantic film, yet one of the descendants of Pandora nonetheless) it is not, as Freud would have it, that everything comes down to sex, but that sex comes down to everything else. So few films have dealt bluntly with the psychology of sex--apart from Pandora and Tango a short list would include Marco Ferreri's The Last Woman and Catherine Breillat's Romance--that Pabst's still feels contemporary. Using a melodrama of a sexual destruction, he made the radical step of eradicating from it all sense of guilt and sin. What Louise Brooks's Lulu still represents of her source is the title of one of Wedekind's plays, erdgeist, earth spirit. When she leaves the film, with a simple shot of her hand going limp, you feel as if the life force itself has evaporated in a wisp of London fog.