Pandora's Box

G. W. Pabst spent months looking for his lead and announced a nationwide search; he turned down Marlene Dietrich. He then saw Louise Brooks, an American playing a circus performer in a Howard Hawks film of 1928, and borrowed her from Paramount. Lulu, as Brooks plays her, cannot be placed in a moral category. She deceives no one, makes no plans, hides no desire, and everyone around her is destroyed because of her. That is where the discomfort lies: the film presents her as neither guilty nor a victim, only shows her. The censors were not ready for it. The film played in many countries with heavy cuts, and in New York a happy ending was attached in which Lulu does not die but joins the Salvation Army. On release critics did not take it seriously. Years later film scholars rediscovered it, and it now counts among the classics of Weimar German cinema, with Brooks's haircut having become an emblem of the period. Who it is for: viewers interested in silent cinema and in female characters still startling by modern standards. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for a moral verdict, which the film never delivers.