Pandora's Box

The rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her. 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. —garykmcd G.W. Pabst's film that catapulted Louise Brooks to international acclaim and made her 'the' icon of the Jazz Age tells the tragic story of Lulu, the hedonistic dancer and prostitute. Based on the plays of F. Wedekind. —Dawn M. Barclift In Weimar Germany, Lulu is an entrancing and beautiful free-spirited Jewish girl who lives on the beneficences of the men who fall under her powerful yet somehow innocent spell. Her current paramour is the highly-respectable Dr. Schön, but even his handsome son Alwa cannot resist the draw which Lulu exerts. Dr. Schön comes to believe he must marry Lulu, even though he has been engaged to a proper young woman of his own class, when his affair with Lulu becomes public. At their marriage celebration, Schön becomes jealously enraged by her behavior, and tragedy ensues. Although Lulu appears to escape the fate that this tragedy would suggest, her unwitting power over men leads her, and several of the men, in a seemingly inescapable spiral downwards toward destitution and further tragedy. —Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>