Pandora's Box

1930 German Pabst silent melodrama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: This is the tragic story of a woman's face and three too many erections.

Another moody, bleak one. I thought the storytelling was a little sloppy and about 30 minutes too long. The sloppiness may be part of the point as Lulu (the "Pandora") and the poor unfortunate souls she comes in contact are pummeled with life and circumstances that seem random and unfair but are almost entirely the result of Louise Brooks and her pretty pretty eyes. This was decidedly modern--in the camera's movements and in almost all of the acting, the lilts and gapes of the former and the uncharacteristic (for the time and genre) lack of pomp of the latter. Brooks herself was fantastic, and she needed to be considering the amount of time the camera would focus on her face. It's also amazing how few title cards were needed to carry the plot--the actions of the story did it just fine. This is one of those silent pictures in which the silence really helps create the atmosphere for a lot of the scenes. Bleakly, the darkness grows progressively in this until it almost becomes suffocating, all the way to the point when the piled-on sins of the characters become deadly.

Trivia: First lesbian role in motion picture history

Speaking of lesbians, here's a big ol' lesbian checking out Lulu's curves in Pandora's Box: