Pandora's Box

G. W. Pabst and Louise Brooks

1929, silent.

Hoo boy—this German film, directed by G. W. Pabst and starring Louise Brooks as "Lulu," is the Citizen Kane of a certain corner of cinema. If you dig even slightly into the literature surrounding the film (and its director and star), you'll uncover a densely woven edifice of praise that lacquers over not only the film, its lead, and its maker, but also the very idea of the film. That "idea," however, is pliable. Being a silent film that uses intertitles to convey dialogue, Pandora's Box leaves ample room for varied interpretations and themes to emerge from its shadowy narrative.

Perhaps the immediate theme is "crime pays, just not very well." This isn't because the story features criminals, but rather that the criminality practiced is usually petty, caused by circumstances that are preventable with a little foresight (foresight isn't among the equipment of our main characters) and Pandora's Box shows off a crude truism: people who sucker the suckers are usually the biggest suckers of them all.

The main character, Lulu, is presented by Pabst as both a bright, innocent young woman—Louise Brooks was just 21 during filming—and a seductive, overtly sexualized figure of desire and desiring who knows exactly what she's doing like a conductor in front of an orchestra. That Pabst can have it both ways in the film and make Lulu a pitiable figure, too, shows off the complexity of how Pabst has constructed his tale. Louise Brooks' Lulu is, at once, intoxicating to most of the male characters (and to certain female ones as well), her allure rendered as potent and affecting as any superpower wielded by a Marvel-costumed superhero. Perhaps this is where the film’s flaw lies—if you doubt the on-screen display of that superpower.

Pabst frames his scenes with a compositional mastery that is just one element of the high visual quality of Pandora's Box. He makes scenes that reference other scenes to help divide the frivolity of his cabaret settings from his "real life" settings in an (almost) brutal way, such as Lulu prancing as a harem girl in a stage act with a fat Pasha character smiling behind her, but later Lulu will be on the cusp of being sold into an Egyptian brothel, the glamour all gone and the brutality of her lifestyle (almost) being shown. But Pabst can't go all the way with this, and so he puts the beaming, smiling Louise Brooks almost right into our lap with close-ups that let us examine her face as intimately as an optometrist looking for conjunctivitis, and what we see is her happy, youthful exuberance.

If Pabst is trying to allude to a morally blinding effect of hormonal chemistry between beautiful young men and women (and old lechers), it isn't from still poses on film of the faces in the cast, but from, and especially in Brooks case, the micro-seconds of expression that flash back and forth. A lot of this story simply doesn't need intertitles because so much is loaded into glances and staring.

Is Lulu particularly aware of how she's wrecking the lives of men around her? A more reasonable question is, why are the men wrecking themselves? Nothing shows this better than how Francis Lederer (as Alwa Schon) is released from the hold Lulu has over him in an almost supernatural moment when Lulu has, shall we say, left this moral clime at last, and Schon immediately tracks down the street after a Salvation Army marching band being led by a beautiful female Color Sergeant carrying their flag on Christmas Eve. Does this mean Schon is going to morally get his life together at last? Is it because the Salvation Army girl is just as enticing, though in a different way, as Lulu? We thought that Schon was doomed to use one of the ropes tied up into noose shapes hanging in the (hilariously) derelict attic that Lulu, himself, and Lulu's "father" (Carl Goetz) share in London after abandoning the continent because of all the trouble stirred up in the previous 1:50 minutes of runtime. Instead of the noose, Schon will survive, at least a little longer. As with so many films that end with a cliffhanger of what may or may not happen with a character, we can sculpt a personal view as to Schon's off screen future, though each one is an illusion because the story is over. I suspect Schon ends up in thrall to a new female, post haste.

Pabst constructs a world rife with vice in Pandora’s Box, yet he spins his main character, Lulu, through it like an untouchable saint—even though she’s being touched constantly. We see Lulu slyly acknowledging her powers in a pivitol scene where Schon and Countess Augusta Geschwitz (played by Alice Roberts) find Dad Schon (Fritz Kortner as Dr. Ludwig Schon) together on the floor of a dressing room, and Lulu's facial expression is no longer that of carefree unawareness. When the film brings Lulu to the brink of being sold and trafficked to an Egyptian brothel, Pabst’s narrative sharpens its point: lust for money ultimately beats out lust for flesh. And in the hierarchy of lusts, Lulu may appear to sit on a pedestal at the top—but that, too, is an illusion.

What's Recent

Original Page May 29, 2025