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| Pandora's Box - Criterion Collection | 
 enlarge | Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Actors: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Krafft-raschig
Studio: Criterion
Category: DVD
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $22.99
You Save: $16.96 (42%)
New (35) Used (12) Collectible (2) from $21.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 9286
Format: Black & White, Dolby, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Ntsc
Languages: German (Original Language), English (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Number Of Items: 2
Running Time: 133
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.6 x 1
MPN: CC1656DDVD
UPC: 715515020626
EAN: 0715515020626
ASIN: B000HT3QBO
Theatrical Release Date: 1929
Release Date: November 28, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Pabst's Unblinking Look at Weimar Germany Embodied by the Iconic Brooks February 6, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
There is no argument that Louise Brooks was a galvanizing presence during her relatively brief movie career, and no one knew how better to capture her mercurial personality and timeless beauty than German director G.W. Pabst. Certainly the deluxe royal treatment given this silent classic in the double-disc 2006 Criterion Collection DVD package would portend a masterpiece, but due to a combination of factors, the 1929 film just misses its mark. Part of the challenge is the deliberate pacing and extensive 133-minute running time. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, "Erdgeist" and "Die Buechse der Pandora", the screenplay by Pabst, Joseph Fleisler and Ladislaus Vajda is refreshingly frank in its treatment of sexual ambiguity and promiscuity and provides intriguing insight into the social decadence of Weimar Germany. At the same time, the film keeps its epic length focused on the whims and travails of an amoral, rather unsympathetic showgirl/prostitute named Lulu, and the net effect can be somewhat enervating in spite of the potent combination of Pabst's creative vision and Brooks' charisma.
The plot begins with Lulu leading a comfortable life as the mistress of newspaper mogul Dr. Peter Schoen. A vivacious and unapologetic flirt, she also tantalizes Schoen's naive son Alwa and the mannish Countess Geschwitz, but she becomes determined to marry Peter when he announces his engagement to the respectable daughter of a government official. As she readies to take the stage in a musical revue, she jealously throws a temper tantrum to prevent Peter from marrying, an overlong episode that exposes his lustful feelings for Lulu in front of his fiancee. Through this twist of fate, Lulu becomes socially prominent, but fate deals harshly with her as she is arrested for murder and sentenced to prison. She manages to escape to a gambling boat where shorn of her famous pageboy bob, she is blackmailed and then winds up walking the streets of London where she eventually meets her destiny.
As Lulu, the stunning Brooks is credible as a tart though not quite to the Shakespearean degree demanded by the story. She has moments of enigmatic power when Pabst's vision becomes palpable, but she never quite transcends the tawdry dimensions of the story. Her severe coquettish look has inspired subsequent generations of actresses from Liza Minnelli in "Cabaret" to Drew Barrymore in "Fever Pitch". The supporting cast is filled with typically excessive performances, in particular, Carl Goetz as the gargoyle-like pimp Schigolch and Alice Roberts as the smitten Countess. The expressionistic look of the film adds invaluably to the story's emotionalism thanks to Guenther Krampf's striking cinematography and Andrej Andrejew and Gottlieb Hesch's modernist sets. The first disc has a satisfactory print with some overexposure evident at key moments.
There is an informative if rather academic commentary track by film scholars Thomas Elsaesser and Mary Anne Doane. You can listen to their comments or select among four different musical scores (although the orchestral accompaniment tends to be too overpowering). On the second disc are three solid documentaries - an hour-long 1998 TCM biography, "Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu", narrated by Shirley MacLaine; a new feature, "Shadow of My Father", where Pabst's son Michael discusses his father's idiosyncratic filmmaking techniques; and a fascinating 48-minute interview with a particularly tough-minded Brooks produced a year before her death in 1985 by filmmaker Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll. The best extra is the 98-page booklet which includes noted film writer Kenneth Tynan's 1979 New Yorker essay, "The Girl with the Black Helmet", which launched Brooks' renaissance.
Louise Brooks didn't need Technicolor or sound.... February 9, 2007
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
G.W. Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX is not a perfect film. It's not even close to perfect. By contemporary tastes, it is too long and too slow. But none of that matters because this is the movie that made Hollywood rebel Louise Brooks a timeless, international film icon.
Norma Desmond's line in SUNSET BLVD (1950)--"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!"--could have been written with Louise Brooks of Cherryvale, Kansas, in mind. Her face, like an object of Art Deco, framed with the "black helmet" hairdo, was perfectly symmetrical, a face no camera could catch from a bad angle even if it tried. On film, her use of that face--or, rather, how Pabst used it in PANDORA--is endlessly fascinating. The line of her profile is extraordinary. Her eyes can flash from flirty to fatal with the bat of a lash. Her expressions, whether pouty, seductive or simply blank--onto which the viewer can write anything--are ample evidence that Louise Brooks was born for a love affair with the lens. While Brooks and Hollywood never hit it off, that face and the camera hit it off right away.
When you watch Brooks in PANDORA'S BOX, you are a voyeur, watching a great love affair between a camera and a soul.
Blessed with beauty beyond measure, Brooks said, perhaps because of that beauty, that she was seen "in Hollywood...(as) a pretty little flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive department decreased with every increase in my fan mail." Savagely nonconformist--after appearing in 13 movies within the studio system that were, to her keenly intelligent mind, no more than fluff--she walked out on Paramount chief Budd Schulberg. She left for Germany in response to director G.W. Pabst's call to star her in PANDORA'S BOX.
Leaving Hollywood behind, she crossed an ocean and walked into screen history.
"In Berlin," Brooks would later say,"I stepped to the station platform to meet Mr. Pabst and became an actress."
It was, she said, "as if Mr. Pabst had sat in on my whole life and career and knew exactly where I needed assurance and protection."
The result of that assurance and protection is on the screen in aces. With skin of alabaster---as if illuminated from within---Brooks is Lulu, the good-time girl, the prostitute who flits from affair to affair, blending ammorality and innocence, blithely unaware of the tragedies she leaves in her wake. That is, until her world crumbles. Convicted of murder, she flees the courtroom in the ensuing fracas. From there, we follow her to the final moments of her life. Brooks herself described the final scene in PANDORA'S BOX this way: "It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood: death by a sexual maniac."
When the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris held a Louise Brooks retrospective in 1955, founder Henri Langlois, standing in front of a huge banner emblazoned with Brooks's image, exclaimed to the crowd: "There is no Garbo. There is no Dietrich. There is only Louise Brooks!"
Many have asked whether Louise Broooks was a great artist or only a dazzling creature whose beauty traps the viewer into attributing complexities to her of which she is unaware? But complex she was and that projects onto the screen as well. A reader of Schopenhauer, Proust and other writers rarely found in the bookcases of Hollywood stars, she also is said to have had a marvelous voice and could have returned to Hollywood in the age of sound pictures and had a glorious career. But she grew tired of making movies---"tired of doing the same thing over and over"---and made her last film at the age of 32.
She devoted her later years to painting and writing essays on Hollywood with a frankness of opinion, a lucidity in her observation of people and a habit of speaking her mind with total candor. But she finally gave up her writing; without mincing words, she wrote to a friend on a Christmas card: "I shall write no more. Writing the truth for readers nourished on publicity rubbish is a useless exercise."
 Pandora's Box January 28, 2007
9 out of 23 found this review helpful
I'm still relatively new to silent film. I've only seen 3 silent films (City Lights, The Gold Rush, and Broken Blossoms), this being my 4th, and I've yet to get used to the surreal style and lack of dialogue that they contain. "Pandora's Box" was a film made during the days of German expressionism with an American actress named Louise Brooks and it is, I can safely say, a great film. The Criterion Collection did a fantastic job with the DVD, so you're probably wondering...Why three stars? Some movies you need to see more than once and maybe I need to see this film again. But right now, it's just not a film that clicked with me. The film is, as I said, a silent film and like all silent film it's got intertitles. This movie is almost entirely told through images. There is, technically, a lot of intertitles but for a movie that runs 2 hours and 13 minutes...There's few. Brooks plays Lulu, a woman who may or may not be a prostitute. The movie leaves it up to us to make our own judgements. The films terrific opening involves Lulu talking to her meter reader when Schigolch shows up. Schigolch is an old man, who Lulu claims is her father, but seems like he may be her pimp as well. While Schigolch is there, another man named Schon arrives. He's about to be married and tells Lulu that he wishes to break off their relationship. The man is depressed and is even more depressed when he discovers Schigolch hiding behind the furniture with a bottle. Even though this is only the first scene, I'm not going to divulge much more of the plot other than the rest of the movie slowly moves along as we see more and more of Lulu's misadventures. She gets sentenced to a prison term, she's almost sold to an Egyptian, and finally meets her demise at the hands of what appears to be Jack the Ripper. Brooks is an absolute wonder of an actress. I don't think I would've stayed with this film if not for her. She doesn't look like she belongs in this film, the way most actresses of that period look as if they could be nowhere else. Brooks looks completely modern, Roger Ebert himself remarked that she (I'm paraphrasing) looks like "Winona Ryder or Demi Moore digitally transplanted into old scenes." That's fairly accurate. She's got that shining black helmet of hair and that porcelain skin, that really makes her look timeless. She makes this film great. As I said, this is a great film. I acknowledge that and I enjoyed several parts of the movie. Problem was, I just really couldn't get into it. I kept asking myself "when is this going to end?" As I said, I've only seen 3 other silent films and maybe I need to see more before I'm able to completely enjoy one. This "review" is used only to express my opinion and not to sway your judgement one way or the other. If you want to seek it out go ahead. If you don't. Don't.
GRADE: C+
Louise Brooks Was Something Else October 3, 2006
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
I am delighted that Criterion is doing the dvd edition as it
will be done right. Anything they do shows touches of excellence. Brooks was simply fabulous as the wanton Lulu
who is out to have a good time no matter what. The extras
promised on the dvd include LULU IN BERLIN which was Brooks
herself talking about Hollywood and an excellent documentary
that ran on TCM and was narrated by Shirley MacLaine. Christmas is coming early.
Pandora's Box - The Criterion Collection DVD Set January 9, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The film is much cleaner and easier to follow with the new subtitle cards. The only complaint I have about it is the absence of the hauntingly beautiful piano music score from the Kino VHS release by Stuart Oderman.
Mr. Oderman's score completely conveys the darkness and hopelessness of the film with his haunting score. This score compliments this film in the same way as the score for the film "The Piano" did. I don't understand why Criterion didn't make it a part of the DVD release.
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