The originality of Pandora comes from [Louise] Brooks's fearless sense of an intelligent woman unable to resist her own sensuality.
--David Thomson
Pandora's Box is another example of how the artistry of the silent film was reaching its peak just when sound was coming in. The star of the film is American Louise Brooks, who had made a few American films but hated the studios and only did a couple of B films after her return to America. Brooks plays Lulu, who sleeps with men for money and with women for fun. She has an iconic bobbed hairdo and an extraordinarily expressive face, which Pabst used for a number of intense close-ups. Lulu is a courtesan who convinces a rich man to marry her and then shoots him as they struggle for a gun that he tries to get her to use on herself, so disgusted as he is with her behavior and his own. The man's son sets off the fire alarm during Lulu's murder trial and they escape to England, where Lulu is murdered by a man she meets in the street, a man who has no money for her but she takes him home anyway,
This lurid tale is a masterpiece of fatalistic eroticism and low-key expressionism. Pabst, along with cinematographer Gunther Krampf, captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of Weimar Germany, where sex and sensationalism are temporary means to thwart despair and self-destruction. A year later Josef Von Sternberg made Der Blaue Engel, with a similar theme.
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