Three days, three classic movies and three of the most glamourous women to grace the silver screen. The movies: Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks, The Killers starring Ava Gardner, and Breakfast At Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn.
Part One: Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks
G.W.Pabst's Pandora's Box, made in 1929 was the movie that catapulted Louise Brooks to international stardom, and made her the icon of the Jazz Age. Two hours of silent German movie-making doesn't initially sound like an easy way to spend an afternoon, but Pandora's Box is a a beguiling and hypnotic piece of cinema, due in no small part to Brooks, whose prescence is bewitching, and performance light years ahead of the usual fare of the period.
An uninhibited roaring 20's flapper girl, Brooks was essentially blacklisted by the Hollywood studios as something of a 'loose cannon', for her over-publicized social life. Brooks departed for Germany and for Pabst, who recognised something in the actress that it would take the rest of the world almost half a century to catch up with.
Pandora's Box tells the ultimately tragic story of Lulu, a young and sexually promiscuous performer (and prostitute), who marries then accidentally murders one of her customers, escapes justice with the aid of her pimp (whom she refers to as her father) and son of her former husband, finds refuge in an illegal gambling den, and ends up living in squalor in the East End of London, where she encountes Jack the Ripper.
Pandora's Box is a melodrama and a surprisingly erotic dreamlike one at that. At times it's unrepentantly over the top with it's frank sexuality (it even features - whisper it - a lesbian), Pabst throws everything but the kitchen sink at it, but it holds together surprisingly well, and moves along at a fair pace for it's age.
But of course, it's Brooks that has endured in much the same manner as Bettie Page. Both women had a small window of success in their time, then endured years in the wilderness before history and popular culture rediscovered their charms and deemed them icons.
Despite the seductive, caredree and deadly manner that Lulu lives her life, Brooks imbues her character with a tragic, childlike innocence. Despite it's outrageous themes, there's nothing sordid about her. The girl simply can't help it.
What marks Brooks out as something beyond her time was her extraordinary naturalistic prescence on screen. Silent movies demanded exaggeration by their very nature, but Brooks face is not only a radiant, beautiful thing, but subtlely expressive, conveying a startling range of nuances and emotions. She was an actress years ahead of her peers in terms of performance.
Even if Pandora's Box were not a decadent, masterful bit of German cinema, it would be worth seeing purely to witness a woman who seduced and possessed the screen with her grace and beauty. A thoroughly modern woman and thoroughly modern movie.
Upon her return to the US, bit parts and B movies followed until she retired from the screen in the forties and lapsed into obscurity and alcoholism. She worked on an autobiography, then incinerated it. She filed for bankruptcy. She became a recluse in New York city. Then in the fities, French historians rediscovered her work and a former lover, the founder of CBS provided a small monthly stipend for the rest of her life. She also later wrote Lulu In Hollywood, a collection of essays on her time in the limelight.
Pandora's Box is available on DVD, restored, re-scored and uncut, and is packaged with an excellent hour long documentary, Looking for Lulu, which is worth is worth the price of the DVD alone.
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