When they were leaving the world premiere of G. W. Pabst’s film
“Pandora's Box” (1928), Louise Brooks could hear her name in the
crowd around her, but she didn’t like the tone they were using. She asked Pabst
what they were saying. He translated: “She doesn’t act. She does
nothing.” This perhaps delighted the great German director, who also chose
Brooks to star in his next film, “The Diary of a Lost Girl” (1929).
In
her autobiographyLulu in
Hollywood,one of the most
charming and honest books about the movies ever written, Brooks says Pabst
refused to discuss the details of a performance with her and never held group
discussions with his actors: “He wanted the shocks of life to release
unpredictable emotions.” Nor did he encourage his actors to associate with
one another. “Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other
actor, present or absent, living or dead,” she writes, and Pabst used that
tension to enhance the emotions in a scene. She tells another story. In the
scenes in their films where Brooks wears thin dresses or nightgowns while
dancing with an actor, he forbid her to wear anything under them. “No one
will know,” she told him. “The actor will know,” he said.
In
not acting, in “doing nothing,” Louise Brooks became one of the most
modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling.
Among those who know the movies, It might be true to say that Brooks is one
actor who still, to this day, inspires deep affection. She is so simple, so
direct, sothere.Watching her fourth-billed in
“The Show-Off” (1926), I watched her effortlessly steal every scene
she was in. The others were there in front of the camera. She seemed actually
in the scenes.
I
don’t mean to suggest that in “not acting” Brooks was wooden or
robotic. There was no doubt when she was expressing sadness, happiness,
enthusiasm, fear. But she suggested an unusual degree of self-possession; in
the middle of a happy scene, the others might act out mirth, but her reaction
would be more one of regarding it, recognizing it. Her job as an actress wasn’t
to lead us in the proper reaction. It was to observe its reality.
Fancy
hair styles were not for her. She had that crisp pageboy bob that Vidal Sassoon
pilfered 25 years later. She had those strong, straight eyebrows, unlike the
coy arches of her contemporaries. She was so slender and fit she seemed poised
for flight. The most extraordinary things happened to her in her best films,
and instead of visibly reacting and telegraphing emotions, she acted as the
instrument to transmit them to us. She encourages identification to an unusual
degree.
By
1928 she was one of the best known movie stars in the world, but she was fed up
with Hollywood and too smart for the way the industry treated actresses. She
was brought to Berlin by Pabst, who was tired of overeager actresses; he had
worked in 1925 with Greta Garbo, another restrained performer. Together they
made two of the greatest of silent films. They were both scandalous for their
portrayals of lesbianism and prostitution, and after returning to Hollywood she
offended the sensibilities of a company town by turning down the lead in
“Public Enemy” opposite James Cagney. She made several unsuccessful
films in the 1930s, and then, she writes in her book, “I found that the
only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six,
was that of a call girl.” One of her clients was William S. Paley, the
founder of CBS, who sent her a check every month for the rest of her life.
The
French film critics rediscovered her; as often, they were ten years early in
telling Americans what was best about our movies. In its article Wikipedia
quotes Henri Langois, founder of the Cinematheque François and the great
influence of the auteur school: “There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich,
there is only Louise Brooks!” It is well known that James Card, film
curator for George Eastman House, found her in New York in the late 1950s,
bonded with her, brought her to live in Rochester, encouraged the writing ofLulu in Hollywood,and launched the second life of
her career. He found her “living as a recluse,” Wikipedia says, but
because of Paley’s loyalty she was not precisely on Skid Row. A veteran film
publicist named John Springer told me: “At a dinner party at my house one
night, Card said he would give anything to find Louise Brooks. I told him he
might not have to look too hard: She had the apartment across the hall.”
“Diary
of a Lost Girl” was the close of her glory days. It’s not the equal of
“Pandora’s Box,” but her performance is on the same high level. It
has a frankness that would largely disappear from mainstream films after the
rise of censorship in the early 1930s. She plays Thymian, an innocent young
girl we meet on the day of her First Communion. Her family lives upstairs over
her father’s drug store, which is managed by a man named Meinert (the actor
Fritz Rasp has a lupine face and cruel smile). It is revealed that her father
has made the family’s young maid pregnant, and she is thrown from the house.
The next maid, Meta, observes that the father can be seduced, and efficiently
does so.
Thymian
feels shut out at home as her father and Meta start a new family. She becomes
pregnant by Meinert, and the scandal is too great for the bourgeois family;
after her child’s birth Thymian is sent to a cruel “reformatory” run
by a sadistic lesbian taskmaster of a woman and her towering, shaven-headed
husband. Running away with another girl, she finds her way to a whorehouse,
where the grandmotherly madam makes it clear what Thymian’s duties will now
consist of.
One
of the clients is Count Osdorff, an old friend of her family and a wastrel
whose half-hearted attempts to help the girl come to nothing. In an ending of
unrestrained irony, Osrorff’s wealthy uncle marries Thymian, who now becomes a
member of Society for the Rescue of Endangered Female Youth. The Society pays a
visit on the whorehouse, where Thymian attempts to play the reformer role
expected of her, but finally rises up in wrath.
One
notable element of the film is that it’s entirely the story of Thymian, just as
“Pandora’s Box” was entirely the story of Lulu. Louise Brooks didn’t
have a personality or screen presence that lent itself to supporting roles. If
both young women are victims, neither is helpless, and the men who would
exploit her find their evil turned against them. In a world of cruelty, the
Brooks characters stand as enduring figures. How she accomplishes this is the
mystery of her acting. “The great art of films,” she wrote,
“does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the
movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.”
Also in my Great Movies Collection: “Pandora’s Box.”
