Pandora’s Box (Preview)
Reviewed by Thomas Doherty

Produced by Heinz Landsmann; directed by G. W. Pabst; screenplay by Ladislaus Vajda, adapted from the Frank Wedekind plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora; cinematography by Günther Krampf; edited by Joseph Fleisler; art direction by Andrei Andreiev and Gottlieb Hesch; starring Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Alice Roberts, Daisy D’Ora, Gustav Diessl, Michael  Von Newlinsky, and Siegfried Arno. Blu-ray, B&W, German intertitles with English subtitles, 141 min., 1929. A Criterion Collection release.

Since, oh, 1955, when film archivist Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque française exclaimed “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!” silent film fangirls-and-boys, mostly boys, have been in a fierce competition for hyperbolic expressions of adoration, scouring thesauruses to find superlatives commensurate with the intensity of their rapture for the object of desire. “Louise is the perfect apparition, the dream woman without whom the cinema would be a poor thing,” sighed Ado Kyrou in Amour-Érotisme et cinéma in 1967, but it was Kenneth Tynan who, in 1979 in his New Yorker profile “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” outdid everyone in the supplicant sweepstakes with a litany of besotted hosannahs of such orgasmic fervor (“the only star actress I can imagine either being enslaved by or wanting to enslave”), that he, upon completion of the assignment, must have laid back, spent but satisfied, and smoked a Gitane.  

The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray edition of Pandora’s Box thus serves not only as occasion to savor a masterpiece of late Weimar cinema before le deluge but also to contemplate the curious phenomenon that is the cult of Louise Brooks (though nowadays it is more akin to a full-blown religion). Not so much rediscovered as seen for the first time, she is the supreme example of a screen icon in retrospect, a face obscure then but preeminent now, reborn as the true It Girl of the silent cinema.

No original negative of Pandora’s Box seems extant, so the Criterion release has been stitched together from three prints from Paris, Prague, and Moscow—the age of Internet communication facilitating interarchive cooperation and the magic of digital restoration programs generating a respectful touch-up but not a distorting makeover. It showcases a crisp new 2K transfer but the wraparound extras basically repackage the material from Criterion’s 2006 DVD release. One difference: the running time of the 2006 version is 133 minutes while the running time of the 2024 edition is 141 minutes. The difference, as restoration supervisor Martin Koerber told us, is due not to frame-rate adjustments but because the “new master is actually a different cut of the film. The differences are all slight—a few frames here or there, different intertitle placements and lengths—but they add up over time.” The restoration was funded by the late Hugh M. Hefner, impresario of the once hegemonic Playboy empire: even in death, Brooks is the beneficiary of the largess of doting millionaires, a species that, as her rival Marlene Dietrich might have sung, clustered to her like moths around a flame.

The plot for Pandora’s Box showcases Louise Brooks in an eight-act dramatic structure. Based on Franz Wedekind’s tandem pair of plays Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), whose frank depiction of a carefree pleasure model named Lulu scandalized fin de siècle Germany, it hit the zeitgeist bullseye during die Goldene Zwanziger of Weimar Germany with its freewheeling concoction of guiltless sex (transactional and otherwise), pimping, white slavery, incest, lesbianism, and murder as sexual climax.  

Lulu is a vivacious flirt and the well-kept woman of the newspaper mogul Dr. Schön (Fritz Kortner). She has been taught the tricks of the trade by the repulsive Schigolch (Carl Goetz), her first “patron,” as she delicately describes him to her sugar daddy. Like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel (1930), Dr. Schön is doomed by his fatal attraction, but unlike Lola in The Blue Angel, Lulu is too impetuous to play the long game with sufficient mercenary cunning. She seems happy to twirl about and luxuriate in the looks of desire, which are everywhere: neither Dr. Schön’s son Alwa (Franz Lederer, soon to be christened Francis in Hollywood) nor Countess Geschwitz (Alice Roberts), a collar-and-tie lesbian, can take their eyes off her. When Schön’s respectable fiancée (Daisy D’Ora) encounters him in near flagrante delicto with Lulu, he decides to make an honest woman of his side chick. Big mistake. On their wedding night, Lulu is entertaining two other men in her bedroom, neither of whom is her recent husband. Schön pulls out a gun, forces it into Lulu’s hands, and orders her to commit suicide. They struggle, a cloud of smoke wafts up between them, and Shön falls dead.

On trial for murder, Lulu appears in the dock in a fetching Goth ensemble whose luster matches her hair; she lifts and lowers the veil, revealing little except a smirk. After sentencing (five years, the jury being male), her friends disrupt the courtroom and, in the chaos, spirit Lulu away. She returns to the scene of the crime and into the arms of Alwa, no less susceptible than his late father. On the lam, Lulu and Alwa, with the leech Schigolch, her former pimp, along for the ride, flee to a den of dockside iniquity. At the blackjack table, Alwa gets caught cheating. More chaos, more fleeing.

The last act finds the trio in a fog-enshrouded, film noirish London, the lighting scheme borrowed from Ufa circa 1922. A Salvation Army band plays, and the missionaries serve hot drinks to freezing pedestrians. In a frigid hovel on Christmas eve, Alwa is catatonic, Schilgolch wants only a last taste of holiday pudding, and a dressed-down but still luminous Lulu is the streetwalker-breadwinner. Lulu picks up a customer who turns out to be penniless, but she invites him up for a tumble anyway: sex was never all about commerce to her. He kills her with a bread knife, but her fate is not the payment due on the wages of sin, it is just something that happens…

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Thomas Doherty, professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, is author of numerous film books.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 2