Diary of a Lost Girl

Thymian is a pharmacist's daughter. A woman working in the house is dismissed and kills herself the same day. Thymian does not know why. Soon after, her father's assistant Meinert assaults her. She becomes pregnant. The family covers it up; they take the baby and send her to a reformatory. The institution is harsh; meals are announced with a whistle, the woman in charge drills them in exercises, and obedience is the point. Thymian escapes with a friend. She has nowhere to go. She ends up in a brothel, and there for the first time nobody hides anything from her. G. W. Pabst directs. Louise Brooks plays Thymian; Fritz Rasp is in the cast. It is a German production and the film is silent. The source is Margarete Böhme's novel, a bestseller in Germany when it appeared. Louise Brooks was American and made two films with Pabst; this was the second and their last together. It passed through the censor on release and sections were cut; the original was partly reassembled years later. The matter it treats is the hypocrisy of moral institutions; the film shows the reformatory and the family as crueller than the brothel. Brooks's playing is outside the exaggerated silent style of the period and still looks natural today. Its ending offers an optimistic resolution and that section is counted its weakest. Who it is for: viewers who like silent cinema and German films of the Weimar period. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the silent form demanding, and the ending inconsistent.