Posts about Louise Brooks
I have written a long article for Film International focusing on the little documented exhibition history of Pandora's Box in the United States (in the 1930s and 1940s). This lost history includes censorship, wholesale cuts, damning reviews, "thrilling sound effects", adults only screenings and ads which scream "Sin Lust Evil !" The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the Little Theater movement, Iris Barry and the NY Museum of Modern Art, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin and others also figure in this story.
My article, “Sin Lust Evil” in America: Louise Brooks and the Exhibition History of Pandora’s Box (1929), can be found at https://filmint.nu/louise-brooks-and-the-exhibition-history-of-pandoras-box-1929-thomas-gladysz/
This article overturns a couple of long held beliefs: one is that Pandora's Box wasn't shown in the United States following its NYC debut in 1929 until James Card showed it in Rochester, NY in the late 1950s. The second is that G.W. Pabst choose Louise Brooks for the role of Lulu after seeing her in Howard Hawks A Girl in Every Port (1928).
Thomas Gladysz
Director, Louise Brooks Society (established 1995)
author of Louise Brooks: The Persistent Star
forthcoming The Street of Forgotten Men: From Story to Screen and Beyond
