Pandora’s Box movie storyline. Lulu is a beautiful young woman who can seemingly work her charms on all of the men around her. She is currently being kept by the rich editor Dr. Ludwig Schön. She is just a plaything however and he is engaged to be married to Charlotte, a woman of his own class. He arranges for Lulu to appear in his son Alwa’s musical revue and he too falls for all of her charms.
When Dr. Schön and his fiancée go to the theater, Lulu ensures that he is put in a compromising situation and the elder Schön feels he now must marry her, knowing full well it will ruin his reputation. On his wedding day, Dr. Schön reaches his breaking point. His actions cost him his life however and Lulu is convicted of manslaughter. She escapes with the help of her old cronies but together they begin a downward spiral.
Pandora’s Box (German: Die Büchse der Pandora) is a 1929 German silent drama film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and starring Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, and Francis Lederer. The film follows Lulu, a seductive, thoughtless young woman whose raw sexuality and uninhibited nature bring ruin to herself and those who love her. It is based on Frank Wedekind’s plays Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904).
Released in 1929, Pandora’s Box was a critical failure, dismissed by German critics as a bastardization of its source material. Brooks’ role in the film was also subject to criticism, fueled by the fact that Brooks was an American. In the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, the film was shown in significantly truncated and re-edited versions, which eliminated certain subplots, including the film’s original, downbeat ending. By the mid-20th century, Pandora’s Box was rediscovered by film scholars and began to earn a reputation as an unsung classic of Weimar German cinema.
Pandora’s Box (1929)
Directed by: G. W. Pabst
Starring: Louise Brooks, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Alice Roberts, Daisy D’Ora, Gustav Diessl, Michael von Newlinsky, Sig Arno
Screenplay by: G.W. Pabst, Ladislaus Vajda
Production Design by: Georg C. Horetsky
Cinematography by: Günther Krampf
Film Editing by: Joseph Fleisler
Costume Design by: Gottlieb Hesch
Art Direction by: Andrej Andrejew, Gottlieb Hesch, Ernö Metzner
Music by: William P. Perry
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Süd-Film
Release Date: January 30, 1929
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