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| Pandora's Box (1929); Criterion Marathon #8 | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 10 2011, 06:49 AM (284 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | May 10 2011, 06:49 AM Post #1 |
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Louise Brooks is Lulu, a party girl with a string of lovers, all of whom end very badly indeed. Her feeling toward sex and relationships and life is... shall we say... "casual". Frankly, Miss Brooks' feeling toward acting is "casual" too... I've never seen anyone look as comfortable onscreen as her except for Will Rogers, and he wasn't NEARLY as sexy. Anyway, a Lulu misadventure ends with the death of one of her men, and I'm not sure if it was murder or suicide or what, and in fact, the film is rather confusing anyway as to which guy is whom (is that old drunk her dad, her pimp, a lover, or what?) but it doesn't really matter, it's the big picture we're looking at. The "sex scenes", such as they are, including a makeout session on the floor of a stage dressing room and a lesbian love scene done while standing up (I think they were dancing), are absolutely white-hot. Lulu's inevitable downward spire, surprisingly, is not a morality lesson - she's completely amoral, and never changes, even when one lover tries to sell her to a whorehouse in Cairo (she needs to escape the police, you see). There is no hint of complaint on her face when life forces her to hide out in a hovel in London, or when she actually is forced to become a streetwalker to survive. She even picks up a man who has no money just because "she likes him". Uh, unfortunately, that guy is Jack the Ripper, and Lulu's in trouble. Or is she? This late-silent German film from G.W. Pabst is technically a movie, but more a 2-hour-plus showcase for 22-year-old Louise, plucked for the role (over Dietrich) when the director spotted her in a Hollywood circus picture. Her real-life seems to have mimicked her art, to say the least. Much fuss was made then (and is made now) over her famous hairdo, but there's a lot more to her than that... She wears her sexuality like (her friend) W.C. Fields wears his nose. Lulu is sentenced to five years for manslaughter in the film, but with the help of friends, she escapes... and heads straight to the house where she murdered the guy, casually lights a cigarette and pokes around in drawers, and then seduces his son (Francis Lederer). And the look on her face... as if everything bores her, but she's never bored. I've never quite seen anything like it. Louise's film career, after this brilliant start, was quickly downhill; she refused to compromise, she refused to take movies (or her career) seriously, and she was easy, losing the respect of powerful people. Believe it or not, her final film, less than a decade after this, was a Three Mesquiteers western for Republic. After that, a string of lovers, and alcohol. She wrote several fascinating articles and an autobiography that Roger Ebert calls one of the few essential books on film. She died in 1985 in Rochester, New York, where she settled because that's where her films were, at the Eastman House. The Criterion DVD of Pandora's Box is wonderful, a 2-disc set packed with bonus material and a thick booklet on Brooks and her films. There are four alternate scores, but the only one I liked was the piano score. Highly recommended. |
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6:22 AM Jul 11