"Imagine Pabst choosing Louise Brooks for Lulu when he could have had me!" -- Marlene Dietrich

Don Reed's portrait of actress Louise Brooks, based on a photo by Edward O. Bagley, graced the cover of the October 1926 Motion Picture Classic magazine. Click photo for larger image. Related articles 'Pittsburgh' premiere: Three Rivers Film Festival opens with quasi-documentary on Jeff Goldblum Local actor finds subtlety in 'Old Joy' 'Portrait' of a filmmaker Three Rivers Film Festival reviews Three Rivers Film Festival schedule

Indeed, the great Austrian director G.W. Pabst's obsessive, two-year, intercontinental search for the leading role in "Pandora's Box" was comparable to Hollywood's search for Scarlett O'Hara a decade later. The German public -- not just the film-going public -- breathlessly awaited, and bitterly resented, its outcome: the selection of a little-known American "cheesecake" starlet over all the great actresses of Europe.

Why would they care so much?

After Goethe's Gretchen in "Faust," Frank Wedekind's Lulu -- in "Earth Spirit" and "Pandora's Box" -- was perhaps the greatest female creation in German literature. Like her mythological model, she unleashes the evils of the world through naivete and curiosity, not malevolence, blissfully ignorant of the havoc she wreaks.

Lulu, in Wedekind's two expressionist plays, expresses herself entirely through pleasure, free of all moral hypocrisy. In a male world where money and sex are the only real currencies, Lulu allows both desire and money to circulate. The relevance to decadent 1928 Berlin was as ominously powerful as Lulu: She creates the anarchy and death by which society is purged of its sexual repression.

		Pandora's Box Where:Regent Square Theater When: 8 p.m. Sunday, with live accompaniment by Philip Carli and with Post-Gazette film critic Barry Paris, author of "Louise Brooks: A Biography," providing an introduction. Information: Tickets, $10; www.3rff.com or 412-681-5449.

"There was nothing German about Louise!" exclaimed her co-star Francis Lederer, who played the son of the rich publisher (Fritz Kortner) whom Lulu seduces and ruins. It was a national insult to think no German actress was good enough to play such a quintessentially German literary role.

Ah, but Pabst was Austrian, and a great innovator at the (bitter) end of the silent-film era. His specialty lay in eliciting deeply psychological instead of histrionic performances, contrary to the over-emotive acting style of the day. Having seen her only in a throwaway Howard Hawks picture ("A Girl in Every Port"), Pabst recognized something in Brooks' smouldering eyes and direct gaze that no American film or script had yet exploited: neither vamp nor virgin, but "the personification of primitive sexuality who inspires evil unaware."

Brooks was a real-life hedonist from Wichita, Kan. Her permissive mother put her, at age 15, on a train to New York, where she danced with Martha Graham in the Denishawn Company. At 17, she was sitting atop George Gershwin's rehearsal piano, holding court in the George White "Scandals" revues. At 18, she was having an affair with Charles Chaplin and dancing with Will Rogers and W.C. Fields in Ziegfeld's "Follies."

At 19, she got a five-picture contract with Paramount but foolishly alienated the studio by refusing to come back for sound retakes on "The Canary Murder Case" at a time when all other sane actors were desperately eager to make the transition to talkies.

Kino International Louise Brooks is Lulu in "Pandora's Box." Click photo for larger image.

Hence, her availability for "Pandora's Box." What Pabst saw in her and wanted was not an actress (sane or otherwise) but a superbly trained dancer, whose beauty was complemented by a penetrating, sharp intelligence. He would not so much "direct" as choreograph her -- which was, after all, what pre-dialogue "moving pictures" were about.

Pabst would also exploit the severe tensions between her and her co-stars. Kortner, for one, hated her as truly and deeply in real life as his publisher-character did in the film. During a scene in which he grabs and shakes her, she recalled, his fingers left 10 deep bruises on her arms.

Alice Roberts, the Belgian actress who plays mannish Countess Geschwitz (whom Lulu shamelessly manipulates for money), never spoke a word to Brooks off-screen and couldn't bear the thought of being in love with her on screen. In what's said to be the first real lesbian love scene ever filmed -- an erotic tango danced by the two women at Lulu's wedding -- Pabst had to position himself behind Lulu's shoulder during the two-shots, so that Roberts could "cheat" her look past Louise and appear to gaze longingly at Lulu while really looking at Pabst.

Geschwitz will be destroyed, too, doomed by her love for Lulu, who escapes after her husband's murder to England -- with his son! There, in the film's third act, she is reduced to impoverished whoredom in a freezing London garret and an appointment with Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl).

That haunting scene, one of the most famous endings in film history, is, in fact, not horrific but the tenderest of love scenes -- until the moment Diessl spots a knife gleaming on the edge of a table in the candlelight.

In the three-quarters of a century since it was made, few other films have elicited as much positive critical attention as "Pandora's Box." But the opposite was true at the time of its release. When it premiered in Berlin in January 1929, there was a negative furor about its open treatment of lasciviousness and prostitution. It ran afoul of the censors in and out of Germany.

But for the most part it was simply ignored in the shuffle and excitement of the new "talkies" that dominated public attention on both continents. Essentially, "Pandora's Box" died in the cusp between silent and sound film -- but not before Brooks herself was bashed to death by the critics.

"Louise Brooks cannot act," wrote one reviewer. "She does not suffer. She does nothing."

It played for a week or two, at most, in a much-butchered version in New York, where New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall, a legendary dullard, wrote: "Miss Brooks is attractive and moves her head and eyes at the proper moment, but whether she is endeavoring to express joy, woe, anger or satisfaction is often difficult to decide."

It took the revisionist perspective of film critics and historians in the 1950s -- and ever since -- to appreciate the subtlety of what she and Pabst were doing.

"In 'Pandora,' we have the miracle of Louise Brooks," wrote Germany's greatest critic, Lotte Eisner. "Her gifts of profound intuition [stimulated] Pabst's encounter with an enigmatically impassive actress who needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence."

The unique alabaster beauty in black bob was 22 years old at the time. Brooks and her career would soon self-destruct into alcoholic obscurity. She was unaware that in "Pandora's Box" -- now considered one of the greatest of all silent films -- Pabst had induced her to reinvent the art of screen acting.

Rating: R in nature for sexuality and violence.