Pandora's Box (1929)

No quote, alas: this is a silent film, albeit one of the last. Like a rather large proportion of the silents I've reviewed, it's German, despite having an American star. The Weimar Republic seemed to have so many of the best directors on the planet during the 1920's and, in a time when films were without sound and consequently language didn't matter, it was able to compete on a global stage, in a way that hasn't been possible since the Tower of Babel that was the onset of sound. Nevertheless, it's tempting to imagine what German cinema would still have been capable if only it had not completely abandoned civilisation, and all its trappings, in 1933.

This is a superbly made and directed film, and Louise Brooks gives a sublime and outstanding performance of a type which simply can't be seen these days. Without the option of speaking, she has to convey some immense subtleties by gesture and expression alone. This naturally leads, up to a point at least, to a "big" performance, and yet there's a lot of naturalism there too. It's a real tightrope, and Brooks walks it with aplomb.

This is also a fascinating film from an historical perspective; it's the 1920's, the flapper generation. And yet these flappers, with their bobs, their cigarette holders and their loose, boyish, semi-revealing clothing, are just one generation away from corset-strapped Edwardian ideas of sexual mores and gender roles. It's tempting, and perhaps not entirely inaccurate, to compare the flappers of the roaring '20s to the mods and hippies of the swinging '60s, although in both cases we should remember that to a large extent we're talking about a relatively small number of young, wealthy urbanites. Also, in the 1920s, there is as yet no contraceptive pill, so the sexual liberatedness of the younger generation tends to stop short of penetrative sex. And, whatever the parallels of flappers to hippies, the general public in the 1920s, well within living memory of Victorian times, was far more socially conservative. Yes, the likes of the Bloomsbury Group, a rather posh bunch of people, may have shagged indiscriminately, enjoyed modernist art and talked about Freud a lot, but in the wider world things were rather different. Case in point: women only gained the right to vote on equal terms with men in 1928 in the UK. In short, the gap between the Bohemians and the majority is rather wide.

We can see this gap rather clearly in the film. For all that Lulu is bobbed, liberated and uber-modern (look at the art in her apartment, and the interior décor), she's a character in a highly moralistic and conservative melodrama which purports to show that such behaviour leads to tragic accidents, imprisonment, gambling, cheating at cards(!), alcoholism and prostitution. It's only the superb quality of the film that prevents it from being the Reefer Madness of flapperdom.

Also interesting is that this film should be not only from the Weimar Republic but set, interestingly, in Berlin, notorious for its licentiousness in Germany at the time. It's all very Cabaret. This film is part of a general mood in Weimar Germany that decadence and loose morals have gone too far, and we all know where that will eventually lead.