Movie of the Day: July 15, 2002

IMDb Movie of the Day
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. (Click here for more of Charles Taylor's review of Pandora's Box, courtesy of The A-List) (more)

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