User Reviews

Of all the silent dramas of the '20s, perhaps none is as compelling and inherently watchable as "Pandora's Box" of 1928. Amazingly, despite its age and completely different cinematic conventions, this G.W. Pabst picture continues to influence filmmakers worldwide. Made in Weimar Germany, it stars Louise Brooks, an American actress now considered the quintessential symbol of the flapper era. If not for her presence, the film would probably never have its incredible durability and cult status. She is the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Mia Wallace in both personality and sheer appearance. For the source of that chic haircut, look no further than Lulu, the proto-"femme fatale" played by Brooks. In a plot that could have come right out of a modern daytime talk show, she manages to destroy the lives of virtually everyone who loves her. Lulu (an aspiring actress), is simultaneously involved with Dr. Schoen (a prominent, high-society man) and his son, while being pursued by a lesbian admirer. To make matters worse, she is "supervised" by a rather disgusting, shady, pimp-like creature impersonating her father. And that's only the beginning. The girl's circumstances become even more bizarre as the action progresses. Obviously, given such a juicy storyline, the audience could well have been treated with a dose of laughable high camp. But Pabst, through brilliant cinematography (and, incidentally, silence), manages to retain dignity and generate powerful emotions as opposed to sarcasm and mild amusement. Precisely because the characters do not speak, we have an opportunity to witness their expressions and gestures. The camera spends much time on Brooks' face, showing the wide range of her emotions: from playfulness to rebellion to despair and back again. That face is one of the most versatile (not to mention the most beautiful) in the history of cinema. At the conclusion of the film's best scene-- as Dr. Schoen's fiancee catches him red handed in Lulu's dressing room-- her competitor slowly dismounts him with a momentary smirk full of hurt and disdain, yet somehow ballsy and triumphant. Such precious and sophisticated details make "Pandora's Box" a masterpiece. The title itself is mentioned in an inevitable courtroom scene midway through the story, by a prosecutor who crudely accuses the girl of being the root of all evil. This is where the film's sociological implications make it stand out from many of its contempories. Louise does not portray a conniving temptress. On the contrary, the people around her fall prey to their inhibitions, delusions and obsessions. Essentially, she is only an indirect cause of their demise and never fully responsible. Lulu's representation as a victim of nothing but her own zest for love and life in a stagnant, repressive society, is an example of humanist cinema at its finest. Brooks' personal life was no less turbulent than her character's: after a potentially prosperous career and scores of lovers (from Chaplin to Pabst himself), she quit the business, refusing to cooperate with its humiliating limitations and rigid standards. Fortunately for us, her name has been immortalized in an impeccable movie.

Louise Brooks is Lulu, a high-end prostitute in 1928 Berlin. She's always dancing around, gay, beautiful, careless -- like Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan except that instead of money she has sex. A couple of her clients are in love with her.

The first thing you notice about "Pandora's Box", aside from Louise Brooks' haircut, is the absence of the usual German expressionism, except for the final scenes, in which the cockeyed quality of the staircase and shadows are appropriate. There's an art deco bas relief prominently displayed on the wall of her husband's apartment but that's generic to the times. The second thing is the lighting, which is exceptionally good. It must be, because I noticed it.

Another thing you notice is that Berlin society in 1928 was pretty cosmopolitan and tolerant. Brooks is at least allowed some access to high society. There is a stage manager who is both identifiably Jewish and homosexual. Brooks' best friend, a Countess, is unquestionably a lesbian. Blacks appear both at a formal fête and in the jury box during Brooks' trial for manslaughter. (She accidentally shot her jealous husband during a struggle.) And I don't know what a menorah is doing on Brooks' mantelpiece but Jews were pretty well integrated into German society by that time and maybe ethnicity and religion didn't play the part it was to play ten years later.

Anyway, Brooks shoots her new husband, is convicted of manslaughter, and she and her lover flee during a chaotic fire alarm. They meet some nasty people. The couple try to reach Paris by train but Brooks is identified by a passenger who tries to blackmail them. The reward is 5,000 marks. How much would that be in Germany in 1928, you ask? Enough to buy a Bratwurst on a roll. All sorts of disasters befall them. Most of their friends and well wishers either get in trouble themselves or turn out to be pretty rotten.

In the end they wind up with their sole remaining companion, Carl Goetz, in a freezing garret. The windows are broken and a blizzard blows in. They're reduced to eating bread that is too stale to cut with a knife and must be broken by hand.

The practical side of Brooks resurfaces and says, "To hell with this." She parts her hair in the old way, paints her lips, and in out on the street looking for clients -- despite a posted warning that Jack the Ripper is on the loose. (By 1928, he must have been 90 years old but no matter.) Guess the identity of the first man she meets and invites up for a tete-a-tete in the garret. But Pabst and his writers, who have done a good job of giving us multi-dimensional characters so far, do it again, even with Jack the Ripper. He's not the personification of evil. He's a frightened, moneyless guy who -- try as he may -- cannot overcome his compulsion.

The movie is a downer. We all want Brooks and her lover, and their friend who manages to get Schnapps even in the most desperate of conditions, to live happy and comfortable lives. It's a downer, but a well-done downer.

Pandora's Box is a 1929 German silent film about the life of Lulu, a beautiful, lively, gregarious but opportunistic and manipulative woman who gets everything she wants with her seductive charms. Her life takes a positive turn at first when one of her lovers', a wealthy editor in chief Mr Schon agrees to marry her, and she is able to break into show biz. But after she kills Mr. Schon in retaliation, her life disintegrates till she is reduced to go back to her old profession as a street-walker.

     A lot many viewers today regard Louise Brooks' uncanny performance as bold, uncompromising and naturalistic. However, in 1929 soon after the film's release, a reviewer from New York Times had said that her expressions were 'hard to decipher at times'. After watching the film twice in two days, I too had similar question about Brook's character Lulu: what is her ultimate aim? Sometimes  we find her confident and heedless of her actions but at others she radiates warmth and sympathy which contradicts her former emotions. 

     Take Lulu's relationship with Mr. Schon, for instance. At the stage show in Act 3, Ludwig Schon along with his fiancé oversee the backstage happenings. When Lulu finds her lover with his fiancé, she flips out. The camera pans on her face and she genuinely seems heartbroken in that frame. That act made me believe Lulu, despite her promiscuity and love for money, truly loved the rich editor in chief. But during act 4 and especially in Act 5 after the ruckus in the courtroom scene, I found myself confused about Lulu's character. I remember Natasha's character from War and Peace who took some reckless decisions driven by instinct but that character, despite being unpredictable, at least had consistency. Therefore we could anticipate to an extent what she might do and become more curious about the situation. I could not say the same about Lulu at points in the film, and this may be partly attributed to the fact that the movie is silent and therefore doesn't have rather advantage of dialogs.Had there been dialogs, I would've probably got a better insight into Lulu's personality. But I should credit Brooks for giving her best shot and making her character starkly different and almost contemporary for that time; her killer looks are something to die for, seriously.

     I also didn't find  some cohesiveness in the storytelling as well. Gustav Diessl's character, a brutal motif serving as a resolution to Lulu's life, should've got more screen time. In fact, I was under the impression she would ditch Alva, the son of Late Schon and Lulu's hapless lover, and make off with that waiter whom she was flirting for a moment at the 'hospitable and discreet' gambling den. I also felt the character of Schigolch could have had more development; it was ironical when Lulu ends up at a garret ( she had mentioned before that she wouldn't want to go back with Schigolch to his old garret), but the initial scene when Lulu danced as Schigolch played his mouth organ could've been brought back towards the end ( like showing Lulu putting on an entertaining act along with Schigolch on the streets trying to fetch some money or attracting some bawdy men perhaps). For some reason, the initial unimportant scenes, though entertaining enough, are unnecessarily stretched. For example, when Lulu refuses to perform the skit, the director could've showed her running straight into the property room instead of having Schon coming to her, pressing her arm in front of the crew and ordering her to perform ending with Lulu telling Rodrigo that they'd do the skit they had planned, before getting into the room with Schon. 

The film's take on lesbianism is praiseworthy and Alice Roberts deserves credit for not shying away from the role. In fact, I heard she had pitched the idea of making the character of Countess Augusta a lesbian. She displays her affection so naturally, understanding the essence of her role. I remember an episode from the reality show Top Chef when one of the female contestants was highly appreciative of a fellow lady contender, and was extremely upset when the latter was eliminated. It was later told during the reunion episode that the two women had pursued a relationship after the show. And I saw the same behavior from Roberts' character - two thumbs up for her performance. 

Even though chiaroscuro is heavily used to the point that sometimes characters lose their facial features, I didn't think there was any purpose to the lighting whereas in movies like Citizen Kane, the lighting created depth, style and personality. The background music is flat and for most part inconsequential and the reason I could not find a connection with the film could be attributed to this element; it seemed to say 'watch the film like you watch any other film, and when the movie finishes, you leave'. For a movie that included controversial subjects, couldn't the background music be more radical and risky instead of a generic orchestra?  

Pandora's Box seems to have gained critical acclaim over the years. But apart from Louise Brooks' risky performance and the fact that controversial subjects were tackled, I did not know what I was supposed to feel after the movie. Is Pandora's Box really worth the curious peek or is it just an empty box?

In the interest of fairness, I'll start off by stating that Louise Brooks has clearly improved a lot as an actress since her blink-and-you've-missed-it screen debut in 1925. The much-reiterated statement that she was some kind of gifted modernistic being with a unique talent showing up the caricatured pantomiming of her contemporaries I still find to be not only at odds with reality, but insulting to just about every silent actress above the level of Mack Sennett's custard pies; Mabel Normand, come to think of it, included. But I will say here and now that Miss Brooks performs at least adequately throughout this film, and there were moments when she actually impressed me. I'm not sure I'd have liked "Pandora's Box" any better with any other star.

But I didn't much like the film, and I'm uncertain how much of that is down to its style -- 'German expressionism' -- and how much results from the nihilistic nature of the Lulu story: realistically, neither this nor the opera were ever going to be a pleasant watch. I'm not sure it's intended so much as a normal story as it is as a representation of a national cultural artifact -- a legend, if you will. I frankly suspect that what the director was trying to put into it was not the same as what I would have liked to be able to get out of it.

One of my problems with "Pandora's Box" was that none of the characters is very likable; it makes it hard to 'take sides' with any of them, which makes it hard to get emotionally involved. Lulu herself is at best identifiable as a spoilt child -- at worst her actions seem more or less random, following perhaps the impulse of a passing moment.

A serious flaw in the technical structure of the film (which, it occurs to me, may be a consequence of translation into English) is that in places the intertitles are positioned between shots in such a way that it is unclear which character is addressing which, causing grave ambiguity. I don't think I've ever encountered a silent film with this basic problem before, let alone one with such a high reputation, and I can only assume that the grammatical structure of German must make it more obvious.

There is no very clear plot-line: the film is, presumably deliberately, constructed as a series of chronologically separate episodes in the life of Lulu, run together in a single strip with next to no indication of when we move from one to another, let alone of where we are and how the characters got from A to B. Every time the story jumped ahead in time, the first few scenes had a sense of mental disconnect while I tried to extrapolate the gap as new details emerged.

Looking back, my impression now of the film is of a nightmare, not of the frightening sort but the vaguely disturbing kind that doesn't quite make sense. Threats and disquiets float in and out of the corner of vision, and everything is faintly tainted, though you're not always sure how. To this extent "Pandora's Box" is powerful indeed; and oddly enough, I don't recall ever seeing it mentioned that it contains humorous moments, even if these tend towards the grotesque.

But in its shadowy decadence I found it lacking in all but atmosphere. The pacing is slow, often dragging, with the camera lingering again and again around a room: it's as if the director is interested more in establishing shots than in the action. Some of the most significant moments to the plot are undercut by over-the-top elements -- Dr Schoen's endless staggering death scene, the normally excellent Alwa's bug-eyed miming of horror, the homicidal maniac who suddenly becomes murderous when the light goes out -- which is somewhat ironic in a film we are told is more 'modern' than contemporary silent productions in which such acting would have been considered terribly old-fashioned.

It has no narrative urgency. It has distant, often arbitrary characters. It is, I would guess, intended as a fable of archetypes rather than a story of ordinary humans, and it's almost certainly not aiming for realism. I have much the same reaction to this as I did to "Metropolis", and people say both of them are timeless classics -- so I'm wondering if there is a certain German school of mannered cinema with which I just don't get on.

I found this German made silent film listed in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, the title didn't suggest anything to me automatically, apart from possibly the famous mythological story being involved, but I watched out of curiosity. Basically in Weimar, Germany, Lulu (Louise Brooks) is a beautiful dancer and prostitute, and also the mistress of well respected newspaper publisher and owner Dr. Ludwig Schön (Fritz Kortner), she lives in an apartment that he pays for, she lives off the money of other men who she seduces with her both enchanting and her innocent spell. One day she is happy to have a visit from old patron and her former "protector" Schigolch (Carl Goetz), with him has brought agent Rodrigo Quast (Krafft-Raschig) who is offering her an opportunity and inviting her to dance in a play. When Dr. Schön tells Lulu he is going to get married to aristocratic Charlotte Marie Adelaide v. Zarnikow (Daisy D'Ora), she uses whatever techniques she can to force him into marrying her instead. On the day of their wedding however, in the bedroom the groom finds his bride partying with Schigolch and Rodrigo Quast, and in anger he gets his gun out, but it is her that he forces to pull the trigger and shoot him, following this she is arrested. Six months pass and Lulu faces the courtroom, and despite the help of Alwa Schön (Francis Lederer), the doctor's son, and his friend Countess Anna Geschwitz (Alice Roberts), she is sentenced to five years in prison as not all the facts of the crime are sure, but she escapes with Alwa when her friends cause a havoc. They decide to travel together to Paris, but they actually end up in a squalid part of London, it is on a Christmas Eve that Lulu meets her fate when there is a prostitution situation, killer Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) is her client it ends with her murdered, while Alwa disappears to join to Salvation Army. American Brooks became a cinematic icon following this film playing the Femme Fatale, and rightly so, with no sound this film relies entirely on the expressionistic imagery and an atmospheric story of false love, sexuality and occasional violence, it certainly has a good amount of tension and intrigue to keep you watching, a most worthwhile silent drama. Very good!

The Germans had a thing for men degrading and debasing themselves without limits for women. For Louise Brooks, maybe it was worth it. This is a silent film worth seeing.

The myth of Pandora* is heartbreaking, and this movie actually follows it rather closely. Louise Brooks plays Lulu, a rather naive prostitute beloved of Professor Schon. Dr. Schon is engaged to a proper lady, but he cannot escape the lure of Lulu. He marries Lulu, but he cannot control her, and she continues her erotic behavior with others. In a rage he attacks her, she struggles, she kills him. She is convicted for the crime, but escapes before she goes to prison. She has seduced Dr. Schon's son Alwa, who takes her away.

For her escape, they go to other countries, and Alwa's money is soon exhausted. Thus begins the spiral into sordid tragedy. Lulu supports Alwa and her pimp by prostituting herself again. Eventually, Alwa sinks so low he comes to himself and leaves her as she takes a john to their room. (At least Alwa ends up better off than Professor Rath in "The Blue Angel.") Ironically, the lover is Jack the Ripper,** who murders Lulu - a circumstance of which Alwa remains oblivious as he walks away down the street. He has given up everything he had for the love of her. She has lost her life, another prostitute victim of a serial killer. Perhaps there is hope for Alwa. Or maybe not. Who knows what's left in Pandora's Box as the curtain is drawn on Alwa's wretched life?

The direction is fabulous. G.W. Pabst was at the height of his talent in 1930, and this movie shows it. All the actors were topnotch: Fritz Kortner as Professor Schon, Francis Lederer as Alwa, and Carl Goetz as the scummy Schigolch (the pimp who pretends to be her father). Louise Brooks is one of the most beautiful women of the 20th Century, and her acting here is flawless, natural. Her power over Schon and his son flows from her face and her body. This film may be the first to show a lesbian relationship between two women (Lulu and Countess Anna), and the version I saw was missing the scenes that show the end of their relationship, leaving a puzzling gap in the story line.

It's interesting to contrast this movie with "The Blue Angel," with Marlena Dietrich as Lola. Dietrich steals the show, of course, with her iconic characterization of the woman of easy virtue, but Lola is never a person we sympathize with. Lulu, on the other hand, has our feelings from the beginning. Lulu is much more complex than Lola, and Brooks inhabits the role completely. (Dietrich inhabits Lola, too, of course -- but Lola has no heart.)

*Prometheus brought mortal men fire, making them more nearly like gods. To punish Prometheus, the gods created Pandora, the first woman. Each god gave her a virtue which she was made to carry to Prometheus in a box. (I understand that Pandora means "all gifts.") Prometheus (which means foresight), wary of women bearing gifts from the gods, sent her away, and he changed all those virtues into evils. Prometheus's brother Epimetheus (hindsight) fell in love with her; Prometheus forbade Pandora and him ever to open the box, but curiosity overcame her. And when she opened the box, all evils were loosed upon the world, leaving her (and mankind) with only hope in the box. (There are other similar stories about a woman loosing evil upon the world because she failed to follow her instructions.)

**Interestingly, the costumes are current for 1929, the year of the movie, and not the times of Jack the Ripper. In this regard, it is similar to "Mating Call," a Twenties film set before the time of its making but showing flappers in all their glory.