Bad Girls Go Everywhere: Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box
Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.
Silent movies can be a hard sell, especially if you're talking to someone who's been burned by one of the clunkier survivors of the era. But I promise you:
Louise Brooks is so mesmerizing that five minutes into
Pandora's Box (1929), you won't even notice the absence of sound. Not for nothing did Cinémathèque Francaise founder Henri Langlois declare in 1955, years after Brooks' criminally short career was over and her films forgotten by everyone but a handful of intrepid cineastes: "There is no
Garbo! There is no
Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!" She's so modern, so subtle, so ferally sexy that it's hard to believe she's a product of the same period as It girl
Clara Bow and Latin lover
Rudolph Valentino. Not to disparage them, but Bow, Valentino,
Gloria Swanson and the rest of the superstars of that era look like products of their time. Louise Brooks looks like the unbelievably cool girl you saw in SoHo last week.
G.W. Pabst's adaptation of German Expressionist playwright Frank Wedekind's then-scandalous
Lulu dramas,
Earth Spirit (1895) and
Pandora's Box (1902) follows the fortunes of a blithely amoral beauty sailing through Weimar-era Berlin and leaving a trail of broken hearts and lives in her wake. The genius of Brooks' Lulu is that she's not an old-fashioned vamp, a film noir femme fatale or a Machiavellian whore. She's just a ruthlessly practical girl playing the hand fate dealt her: She's not rich or socially connected or educated, but men - and women - can't resist her. And if she lets them make fools of themselves for her, well, that's her nature - you can't blame her any more than you can blame the scorpion for stinging.
Chicago's merry murderesses have nothing on Lulu, and
Cabaret's divinely decadent Sally Bowles was a babe in the demimonde by comparison.
The restored print Criterion used for its new DVD, an archival reconstruction, is the best version of
Pandora's Box I've ever seen: It toured art-house theaters earlier this year, thereby reducing normally restrained critics to immoderate flights of hyperbole. And they're right on every count.
Some points for discussion:
Is watching a silent film with intertitles a significantly different experience from watching a subtitled foreign film? Some early film commentators argued that sound would ruin the art of filmmaking, because dialogue could be used as a shortcut to deliver information that would otherwise have to be conveyed in images. And they may have been right: It's easier to follow the average mainstream movie with the sound on and the picture off than the other way around.
What qualities make some stars from the early years of movies seem quaint and old-fashioned, while others - despite their dated clothes and conventions of dialogue and character - seem absolutely modern?
Remember: Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
Previous DVD blogs:
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets and our Jack Palance interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
this week's new DVD releases
