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The first shock of Pandora's Box, adapted from German playwright Frank Wedekind's once-scandalous Erdgeist and Die Buchse der Pandora, is Brooks' vivacity. In action she's mesmerizing, bold and capricious, sensual and direct. She knows how to drape herself over a sofa, how to reach out her arms to be embraced, how to stroke a man's hair or a woman's arms. Brooks is thoroughly sensual without a trace of calculation, and Pandora's Box vibrates with her erotic energy. Pabst had seen her in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port (1928) and was convinced she was the only actress who could play gorgeous guttersnipe Lulu, a girl of mysterious background and startlingly directness. But she wasn't available, and Marlene Dietrich, veteran of more than a dozen undistinguished sex romps, was campaigning hard for the lead. Dietrich, still carrying a little baby fat and three years away from The Blue Angel, which wrote her ticket to Hollywood stardom, knew a star-making role when she saw one. And Pabst was ready to sign her, despite finding Dietrich "too old [all of 26] and too obvious — one sexy look and the picture would become burlesque," when the 22-year-old Brooks was suddenly at liberty.
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Brooks' Lulu is a quicksilver mass of contradictions: Innocent and worldly, calculating and aimless, sophisticated sphinx and unworldly girl. She likes sex, but she likes luxury even more. Brooks plays Lulu as a tremendously modern seductress; she knows the face that will get her what she wants, and doesn't hesitate to put it on.. What her Lulu lacks in breeding and education she makes up for with feral savvy. She knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of men, and they're not very complicated. Lulu seduces Herr Schoen, a much older newspaper man, and breaks up his plans to marry a more respectable girl. On their wedding day, Schoen finds her in the arms of not one rival, but three: Lulu waltzes seductively with the lesbian Countess Gerschwitz, kisses Schilgoch — an older man whom she represents variously as her father and her friend — and embraces Schoen's own grown son, Alwa. Why? Because she wants to.
Schoen goads Lulu into shooting him and she's charged with murder. And yet somehow, a vision in widow's weeds and downcast eyes, she seduces the jury gets away with being convicted of manslaughter. When a false cry of fire goes up in the courtroom, she escapes in the melee, and she and Alwa flee to Monte Carlo. He gambles away their money and she's sold to an Egyptian whoremaster, but she, Alwa and Shilgoch manage to escape to London. Within months they're destitute, and Lulu — the only one with anything worth selling — takes her wares to the street. "It is Christmas Eve," Brooks wrote decades later in an essay collected in Lulu in Hollywood, "and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac." Lulu's first and last London client is Jack the Ripper.
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The fifth movie adapted from Frank Wedekind's "Lulu" plays, Pandora's Box is saturated with sex and Brooks' recollections of Berlin, where Pandora's Box was shot, suggest part of the reason. This was the Berlin of Cabaret, where decadence was indeed divine and Lulus were its high priestesses. "Sex was the business of the town," Brooks later wrote. "At the Eden hotel… the café bar was lined with the higer priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside. On the corner stood the girls in in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors' agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian quarter. Race track touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen. Eldorado displayed an enticing line of homosexuals dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of feminine or collar-and-tie lesbians. Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies, when Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu's stage entrance was described by Wedekind: 'They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.'" While abroad, Brooks got the call to return to Hollywood and dub dialogue for the silent Canary Murder Case (1928), a minor film in which she had played a minor role. Sound technology was about to consign silent movies to the scrap heap of history, and studio heads were scrambling to salvage what they could of their existing inventory. Brooks said "no" with typical unthinking capriciousness, forcing Paramount to hire someone else to do the job (that someone happened to be Margaret Livingston, an industry veteran who had been the mistress of producer Thomas Ince; Livingston was aboard William Randolph Heart's yacht on November 18, 1924, when Ince died under still-mysterious circumstances). It's easy blame puritan America and philistine Hollywood for Brooks' downfall, but after working with her on three films even Pabst had had enough of her antics. She herself confessed that he had warned, "Your life is exactly like Lulu's, and you will end the same way." Ouch. By the time Brooks deigned to return to Hollywood, the dice were cast: The word was out that she was more trouble than she was worth. Brooks hung around and made an additional seven films between 1931 and 1938, playing what amounted to bit parts in several of them, before finally conceding that her great Hollywood adventure was over. She spent most of her post- Hollywood life in poverty and isolation, even as successive generations of movie lovers fell in love with her eternally vibrant image. |
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By 1955, when Langlois made his famous declaration in the catalogue of the Cinematheque's "60 Years of Cinema" exhibition, Brooks was nearly 50, holed up in a miserable apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She was rescued by film preservationist James Card, who worked for Kodak's George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, a film archive and museum located in Rochester, New York. He persuaded her to move upstate, and she spent the rest of her life writing in, sometimes about movies in general but more often about her own darkly picaresque journey through the dream machine. Her addictively readable prose was acid tipped and laced with a rueful sense of humor, simultaneously bitter, world weary and laceratingly perceptive. Brooks'died in 1985, but her legacy lives, extending far beyond her own films (if you don't own the Criterion Collection edition of Pandora's Box, I highly recommend you rectify that situation ASAP). Like pin-up princess Bettie Page, another small town girl with a big persona, Brooks' image is so ingrained in our pop-culture consciousness that it risks being divorced from its source. When writer John P. McEvoy's racy Jazz-age novels about enterprising showgirl Dixie Dugan became a syndicated newspaper strip in 1929 (after they'd already inspired a Broadway musical starring Ruby Keeler), artist Joseph Streibel made her look like Brooks. The strip's mind-boggling run began in 1929 and lasted until 1966, outlasting both McEvoy and his son. Adult comics writer/artists Guido Crepax and Hugo Pratt reimagined Brooks in Valentina and Corto Maltese (in which her avatar is named Louise Brookszowyc.). Brooks has inspired fetish painter Brian Viveros kBetter Sensualchicksonline Fi Topic Princess Margaret Cash Cars Lottery Sensual Chicks Online Erotic Filmf e Sensual Chicks Online Sensual Chicks Online sBetter Sensualchicksonline Fi Topic Princess Margaret Cash Cars Lottery Sensual Chicks Online Erotic Filmd p Sensual Chicks Online z Girls Sensual Chicks Online |