Pandora's Box (1929)

Eureka are releasing an excellent restoration of G W Pabst's 1929 silent melodrama on Blu-ray, using materials sourced from three different prints and with some decent extras, as part of their Masters of Cinema series.

Lulu (Louise Brooks) is young, carefree, ambitious and a prostitute. Through a series of liaisons both past and present she becomes a showgirl and contrives to hang onto one of her lovers, newspaper editor Dr Ludwig Schon (Fritz Kortner) after he tells her he has plans to marry. She manages to disgrace him before his future bride and ends up marrying him herself.

Unfortunately for her, and because of her, the wedding night is a disaster and her new husband is killed. Lulu stands trial but escapes with Dr Schon's son Alva (Frances Lederer, best known to readers as the mad scientist in Gerardo De Leon's TERROR IS A MAN and Dracula himself in Paul Landres' RETURN OF DRACULA). On the run, she and Alva slowly enter a life of squalor, culminating in her meeting a sadistic killer when she recommences her old career.

In many ways, the opening half of PANDORA'S BOX presages the soapy hedonistic bestsellers of the 1970s popularised by the authors such as Harold Robbins and Judith Krantz, which would often show posh people being undone by an ambitious youngster from the wrong side of the streets, only for they themselves to come undone. The second half of the film, which details Lulu's comeuppance, is more of a slog, and with a running time of well over two hours, the film probably doesn't need to be as long as it is. 

It certainly deserves to be called a masterpiece, though. Even now, nearly 100 years later, it's possible to be impressed by Pabst's directorial eye, with some shots emulating paintings by Bosch or Hogarth. Extras kick off with an excellent commentary from Pamela Hutchinson who wrote the BFI guide to movie and gives us plenty of excellent observation and analysis of what's happening onscreen. Kat Ellinger provides a 20 minute look at the emergence of a new kind of woman - the 'dangerous feminine' in 1920s cinema, David Cairns looks at how the film adapts its source material, in particular in relation to Pabst's revolutionary style of film-making in Godless Beasts, and Fiona Watson provides a 20 minute video essay on star Louise Brooks. Finally, there's an eight minute piece on the restoration of the film itself, showing the huge amount of work that went into what we now have to enjoy on Blu-ray. Eureka's set also comes with a 60 page book featuring new writing on the film.

G W Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX is out on Blu-ray from Eureka on Monday 30th October 2023