Pandora's Box (1929)

Saturday July 15, 8:20pm The Castro, San Francisco

" . . . watch out for this girl!"

It is doubtful any film actress in the nineteen-twenties displayed a greater sense of overt sexuality on screen than Louise Brooks. With a spate of popular Hollywood films under her belt including The Show-Off (1926), A Girl In Every Port (1928) and Beggars Of Life (1928), she thumbed her nose at Paramount and broke her contract to star in what would be her two greatest films, Pandora’s Box (Die Buchse der Pandora) and Diary of a Lost Girl (Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen), both with German director G. W. Pabst in 1929. These two films would elevate a good director to near-legendary status, make a cultural icon out of Brooks and virtually destroy the rest of her acting career in the process. Returning to Hollywood in 1931, she was relegated to supporting roles and B movies, before retiring in obscurity less than ten years later.

Lulu . . .

Based on two plays written by Frank Wedekind, Pandora’s Box is the story of Lulu (Brooks), a tempting, amoral beauty no man can resist, usually with tragic results. Pabst successfully created a separate and distinctive mood for each part of the story, which follows Lulu from her privileged life as a kept woman, through a disastrous marriage, into fugitive flight and her eventual demise in poverty.
The theater sequence with its animated back-stage chaos, scantily dressed dancers, acrobats and frantic stagehands, is a dazzling showcase with Brooks as its centerpiece. The arrival of her ‘patron’ Dr. Schoen (Fritz Kortner) with his fiancée sparks sexual tension that is matched only by Lulu’s ferocious kicking, screaming tantrum and its erotic overtones. When Lulu and her friends flee Berlin after her conviction at Dr. Schoen's murder trial they find themselves aboard a claustrophobic, smoke filled gambling boat they are soon desperate to escape. They arrive in London, which Pabst shrouds in a murky darkness, and languish amid the squalor of their hiding place.
Pabst' lingering images of Brooks, sparkling in jewels and bursting with energy are the embodiment of pure sexuality on film. Considered far too controversial by 1929 standards, Pandora’s Box was severely cut by German censors who objected to elements of pandering, prostitution and lesbianism in the story.

The 11th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival concludes it's second night with a new print of Pandora's Box, introduced by Thomas Gladysz of the Louise Brooks Society. The program also includes trailers from The American Venus (1926), Brook's second film, which is now considered lost.
Live musical accompaniment for Pandora’s Box will be performed by Clark Wilson at the Castro’s Wurlitzer.