Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirteen

Lovely Lulu Lives Again
by Laura Evenson, San Francisco Chronicle (1998)

A decade after her death, silent-film star Louise Brooks is more popular than ever.

She drank with W.C. Fields and Tallulah Bankhead, socialized with Robert Benchley, danced with the Ziegfeld Follies, slept with Charlie Chaplin and beat out Marlene Dietrich for the starring role of Lulu in the 1928 German classic “Pandora’s Box”.

Yet for all her charisma, beauty, talent, lovers and antics, Louise Brooks is probably best remembered for her trademark hairstyle, a glistening, raven helmet called the bob.

A silent-movie icon who did her bit to make the 1920s roar, Brooks is enjoying a revival 70 years after the height of her fame and more than a decade after her death. A mini-mania over Brooks erupted about eight years ago when Knopf published Barry Paris’ “Louise Brooks” biography.

Spurring the latest revival is a new documentary, “Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu”, that will be shown Tuesday on the Turner Classic Movies channel. On May 18, the Castro Theatre in San Francisco will screen “Pandora’s Box” as part of a citywide Femmes Fatales Festival that coincides with a femmes fatales series at the San Francisco Opera. That series includes a new production of Alban Berg’s 1937 opera, “Lulu”. But in this version, the title character will look more like a leggy Jean Harlowe-style siren than Brooks’ petite vixen.

Two San Francisco exhibitions that feature Brooks will be displayed at What’s for Dessert, a cafe and bakery on Church Street. Starting today and running through the month, “Stars of the Silent Screen” will include movie memorabilia, portraits, film stills and other vintage material designed to promote early screen stars including Brooks and Rudolph Valentino.  Starting May 31, a “Homage to Lulu” exhibition will display literary, cinematic and musical evocations of the Lulu archetype, from Frank Wedekind’s turn-of-the-century expressionist plays through Berg’s opera.

What is it about Brooks that stirs such passion and nearly fanatical devotion?

“She’s an amazing screen presence, and she was incredibly beautiful, but it’s really the extra-cinematic qualities about her that stir devotion”, said Thomas Gladysz, a Brooks fan who has put together the exhibitions. “She was amazingly intelligent, has quite a compelling life story, and later wrote very witty, intelligent essays on film. Plus, she had a smashing haircut”.

Brooks’ compelling life story started in 1906 in Cherryvale, Kan., then moved rapidly to New York, where at age 15 she joined the renowned, arty Denishawn Dance Company that included a young Martha Graham. But by age 18, Brooks’ infamous reputation for hauteur and temper prompted Denishawn director Ruth St. Denis to expel her from the troupe. In the next year, she danced with the George White Scandals, joined the Ziegfeld Follies, had an affair with Chaplin and signed a five-year contract with Paramount.

Later, Brooks would say: “I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned how to dance by watching Charles Chaplin act”.

Films with Paramount included “The American Venus”, “A Girl in Every Port” and “Beggars of Life”.  But when B.P. Schulberg denied her a raise in 1928, Brooks quit Paramount. Later that year, she rejected $10,000 offered by the studio to dub a movie she had just finished as a silent, “Canary Murder Case”.  Meanwhile, she had gone to Germany, where she starred as Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box”.  She went on to star in Pabst’s “Diary of a Lost Girl” and “Prix de Beaute” directed in France by expatriate Italian Augusto Genina.

While the European films are perhaps her most enduring, snubbing Paramount cost her the chance to equal them in Hollywood.

“The studios were using the impending arrival of sound as an excuse to bust contracts, and her outrage was totally justified,” said biographer Paris. “Every single other Hollywood star agreed to it, but Louise Brooks didn’t. She was so far ahead of her time in terms of taking control of her life.”

Paris adds that while Brooks was beautiful, brilliant and original, she also exhibited a shadowy side. “She was also by far the most self-destructive, difficult, bitchy, obnoxious and belligerent character to hit Hollywood,” he said.

Elaina Archer, co-producer of the TCM documentary, attributes the promiscuous Brooks’ difficult personality to her intelligence and, in part, to her having been molested at age 9 by a neighbor.

“I think that event led her to want to control her own identity, and because of it, I think she didn’t like to be controlled by men,” she said, “She wanted to be in control, and what better way to do it than with sex?”

After Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1930, she landed a series of small roles in films, including “It Pays to Advertise” with Carole Lombard in 1930, “When You’re in Love” with Cary Grant in 1937 and her last film, “Overland Stage Raiders” with John Wayne in 1938, just before Wayne became a star in “Stagecoach”.

When major film roles failed to materialize, she tried to run a dance studio in Wichita, Kan., failed and returned to Manhattan. There she did radio work, gathered gossip items for Walter Winchell and had a short-term stint as a sales clerk at Saks.

“She probably would have died alone, incoherent and forgotten, if not for James Card, the legendary film curator of Eastman House who made her move to Rochester and write,” Paris said, “He’s the real hero of her life.”

In the 1950s, a retrospective organized by Henri Langlois in Paris re-established Brooks in Europe as an American icon, an image shored up through the 1960s and 1970s through her friendships with an array of film historians and critics including Kevin Brownlow and Kenneth Tynan.

She remains an object of fascination to this day. Her frank sexuality and her whimsically childlike quality have captured the imagination of M. Doughty, 27, lead singer and lyricist for the New York funk band Soul Coughing. In September, the group will release a paean to Brooks called “St. Louise Is Listening” on its new release, “El Oso” on Slash/Warner.

Another homage to Brooks pops up in “Lulu on the Bridge” a film starring Mira Sorvino and Harvey Keitel that will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. In it, Sorvino plays an aspiring New York actress who captures the role of a Brooks-style Lulu in a contemporary remake of “Pandora’s Box” Keitel plays her lover, an ill-tempered jazz musician.

Shirley MacLaine, who hosts the TCM documentary, for years has wanted to do a film about Brooks’ later years. She is also a member of the Louise Brooks Society, the 600-member organization headed by Gladysz, who created the “Homage to Lulu” and “Stars of the Silent Screen” exhibitions in San Francisco. Gladysz also maintains a massive Web site at Pandora’s Box that features photographs, articles, information about silent films and the jazz age, and links to a range of Brooks-related sites, including one for bob-haircut worshippers.

Hugh Munro Neely, director of “Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu” credits Gladysz’s site with helping to sell the idea for the documentary to Turner executives. It includes interviews with Brooks’ friends such as actor-film scholar Roddy McDowell, actress Dana Delaney and Frances Lederer, who co-starred with Brooks in “Pandora’s Box”.

“When we originally put together a proposal, (what) we discovered was that Louise was one of the most popular silent film stars on the Internet and that there were a number of sites dedicated to her,” Neely said “The hub of all that activity is Thomas Gladysz’s site.”

Tom Karsch, senior vice president and general manager for TCM, said that he immediately went online to learn more about Brooks after Neely and the film’s producer, Elaina Archer, brought the project to him.

“In this case, Web sites such as the Louise Brooks Society and several others helped confirm our decision to go ahead with producing the documentary after we got the pitch,” he said.

But documentary producer Archer credits the making of the film to the allure of Brooks herself.

“Most of all it was her natural way of performing in front of the camera,” she said.

Anita Monga, director of programming for the Castro Theatre, said interest in Brooks is so infectious because of the actress’ rare, special charisma.

“She’s a combination of vixen and innocent, and her life force comes through on the screen,” Monga said, “She’s also really intelligent, and it’s obvious. Sexy and intelligent. You can’t beat that.”

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PANDORA’S BOX: CRITERION COLLECTION
Reviewed by Judge Brett Cullum, DVD Verdict

The Charge

“I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned how to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.”—Louise Brooks

Opening Statement

In 1929 Louise Brooks fled Hollywood’s Paramount studios and headed to Berlin to work under G.W. Pabst in Pandora’s Box. Everyone told her it was career suicide, but the girl with the black helmet hair found the vehicle that elevated her from everyone’s favorite flapper to immortal screen legend. The film stands out even today as a daringly dark, psychosexual journey which features incestuous love triangles, murder, prostitution, lesbians, and even Jack the Ripper bedding the heroine. Pandora’s Box is a decadent classic that The Criterion Collection has thankfully named its 358th title worthy of the best treatment DVD can muster.

Facts of the Case

It’s all about a girl named Lulu who nobody can resist. She’s a dancer who seduces everyone to get exactly what she wants. Trouble is, Lulu shakes society to its core by using sex as a weapon, and the consequences are terrible. Like the mythical figure alluded to in the title, the girl seems to unleash hell anytime someone falls for her. A father and son are ruined, show business moguls topple over in disgrace, her first husband finds himself shot, and his son flees the country as a chronic gambler. Ultimately Lulu herself attempts a fatal trick with an infamous serial killer on Christmas Eve.

The Evidence

There has never been a role that defined an actress so much as Lulu did for Louise Brooks. The story came from a series of famous German plays, and director Pabst was severely chastised for casting an American in the lead role for his film adaptation. He protested that even a German actress such as Marlene Dietrich couldn’t pull the character off like Louise Brooks, and the end result proves him right. Pandora’s Box is an ensemble piece, but you’ll walk away with one indelible image—Louise Brooks as Lulu. She’s a revelation in the role, and she introduced a realistic acting approach to cinema that revolutionized cinema. Even though the film was silent, Brooks scrapped the melodramatic techniques of her peers in favor of playing everything for honesty and truth. Instead of conveying one emotion at a time, Lulu became a portrait of mixed feelings so complex you swear you hear her voice as you watch.

Pandora’s Box is wonderfully designed and technically a flawless picture of the era. Pabst’s camera techniques and skill easily put him up there with German contemporaries such as Lang, Wiene, and Murnau. Yet in contrast to those expressionistic visionaries, Pabst gives us a heady romantic tale firmly set in a tangibly real world with classic elements. He was a master of working with actors to tone things down when needed, but allowing the chaos to explode when he wanted it to. A control freak to the core, Pabst manipulated his sets to insure he got exactly what he wanted. He made sure Fritz Kortner used no restraint when manhandling Brooks during their confrontations in the film, and even destroyed a favorite dress of the actress to make her feel violated and defiled in the final sequence. Pandora’s Box captures Weimar era Germany perfectly complete with sexually forward touches: including a father and son love triangle, and the introduction of the screen’s first lesbian Countess Geschwitz (in American pronounced awfully close to “gay switch"). The film was mercilessly censored by the American film board, which didn’t even allow these relationships be revealed, and changed the ending entirely to omit the serial killer. By 1929 standards this was a shocking piece that was contemptible and reviled by censors worldwide.

If there is one DVD company that can deliver Pandora’s Box in a complete, gorgeous package, it’s The Criterion Collection. Collectors will be happy to know the film has never looked better, and even more astonishing is how robust the sound is. The picture has been digitally polished, and even though inevitable blemishes remain the result is awe-inspiring. The release looks fresher than it ever has, and the transfer is as near perfection as we can expect from the source. There are four different musical scores to chose from including two orchestral treatments, a cabaret style, and improvised piano. The first orchestral traditional score can be played in either full surround or stereo, and the others are offered in two speaker modes. Each track changes your experience of the silent film, and it’s pure genius to allow the viewer the option of several to fit the mood.

Extras are contained mainly on a second disc, and include several documentaries and a still gallery. First up is a 1998 biography of Brooks produced by Turner Classic Movie network called Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu. It’s a very good sketch of the actress’s entire life narrated by Shirley McLaine. Next up a forty-eight minute interview with Brooks herself filmed in 1971 conducted by Richard Leacock named Lulu in Berlin. We also get a 2006 interview with Pabst’s son, and an extensive still gallery. On the feature film disc is an essential commentary provided by film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Ann Doane. They avoid the typical dry scholar analysis by engaging and debating each other throughout the film. Also included is a book of photos and essays on the film.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Even though Pandora’s Box contains sexy, sadistic scenes, it’s still a silent film from 1929. The pace set at the 133 minute running time is not fast-paced by any stretch of the imagination, and modern viewers may have their patience tested. Certainly the rewards are great for those who can slog through the first half hour, because soon you forget its a silent film. It still feels drawn out, and eight acts seems a few too many to convey the story with any sort of economy. Sit back and soak up the sumptuous visuals when things get slow, because they never stay that way long.

Closing Statement

This is how DVD is done for classical films, and you couldn’t ask for more from the people who produced this package. Pandora’s Box is a masterpiece of German silent cinema, and the lasting legacy of American actress Louise Brooks. You’re not a true cinema fan until you’ve watched this title, and here’s the edition to seek out. The transfer has never looked better, and the extras impart why the film is such an important entry into film history. And any chance to revisit one of the silver screen’s sexiest sirens is a must-own in my book.

The Verdict

Pandora’s Box is guilty of being sleek, sexy, and silent.

Scales of Justice

Video: 95
Audio: 100
Extras: 100
Acting: 98
Story: 95
Judgment:  98

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Opening up Pandora’s Box
Paul McGann on Louise Brooks’ silent beauty
The Guardian (2007)

Louise Brooks is unique and immortal. Her face can still command a magazine cover, the breathtaking beauty and the enigma are always instant and contemporary. She never dates or ages. To see her in Pandora’s Box is like watching a modern, living actor who had somehow moved into a silent film set. And at the same time she brings home how rich the silent cinema was and how much it can still offer. She is the model and the despair of actors. She simply IS her character. What actor does not dream of that?

How did this 22-year-old from Cherryvale, Kansas, end up playing the most iconic role of German theatre in one of the classic films of German silent cinema? She had begun her career as a teenage dancer with the avant-garde Denishawn Company, and progressed to the Ziegfeld Follies. At 20, she was in Hollywood. Her bobbed hair and her looks did not make a huge hit with audiences; but the German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst had taken notice. By 1928 Pabst had spent two years on an obsessive search for an actress to play Lulu. Rather like the casting, a decade later, of Scarlett O’Hara, startled women were approached in railway stations and on street corners by Pabst’s assistants, and carried off to be auditioned. Some possessed the look but couldn’t act, others might have great skill but the wrong physical attributes. Hundreds were tested, all were turned down.

Looking for a Lulu became a German national concern. Frank Wedekind’s erotic heroine was one of the great figures of the nation’s literature. Driven by curiosity and free of moral constraint, she can express herself only through pleasure. More a concept than a character, Lulu was a poetical German figure, perhaps even an element of the nation’s psyche. Ambivalent about the prevailing expressionist tendency in German cinema, Pabst sought to combine Wedekind’s two Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, modifying their grand guignol excesses. Pabst was developing a new cinematic style and wanted this Lulu to be “real”. More real than anything else - for Pabst and for cinema - was her visual image.

Pabst had spotted Brooks’ breathtaking beauty and defiant sexuality in Howard Hawks’ 1928 A Girl in Every Port. He’d asked for her at once, but she was under contract to Paramount. As the legend goes, at the very moment Brooks was refusing to sign a new contract in Hollywood, in Berlin the young Marlene Dietrich was about to be offered the lead in Pandora’s Box. Instead Brooks, suddenly free, was given the role after all. Brooks walked away from Hollywood and into immortality.

Seeing Pandora’s Box now, it is strange to think of the panning it got on its release. It represents the peak of silent-era cinema and is one of the most adult pictures ever made. Only when we learn how much its look at lasciviousness, pimping and prostitution - not to mention the first outright lesbian character in cinema - turned censors into butchers, do we begin to understand. Most critics were only able to review mutilated versions. The failure of the film was assured with the arrival of the talkies.

Pabst would get over the disappointment. His reputation was solid and in the decades that followed he’d make successful pictures. He and Brooks were to have a better press with their next collaboration, Diary of a Lost Girl. Brooks went on to Paris to create another unforgettable tragic portrait in Augusto Genina’s Prix de Beauté. But after that, at 24, the game was up. She returned to Hollywood, which gave her derisory roles in films that were instantly forgotten. Whatever it was she wanted, it couldn’t have been movie stardom. She married. She vanished. In the 1960s she re-emerged as a writer of vivid style, and the shrewdest commentator on the inside history of Hollywood. It was at this time that the extraordinary creation of Brooks and Pabst began to be rediscovered.

· Pandora’s Box, with the world premiere of a live Paul Lewis score, screens on September 15 at Colston Hall, Bristol

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DIARY OF A LOST GIRL

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Prix de Beauté (aka Miss Europe)

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

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