I'm a fan of great silent movies because they're like time machines, letting us watch people like ourselves who, however, lived about 90 years ago or slightly less. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to watch your great-grandparents' world in news footage? What if your great-grandparents were from the decadent world of post-Weimar Germany? Not fiction like "Cabaret" but really? And what if the central personality in the movie you watched in this degenerate post WWI environment had as modern an acting style as Robert DeNiro instead of the antiquated, overly melodramatic/overly stylized hamminess that folks usually associate with silent films? Friends, try to rent a copy of "Pandora's Box" starring Louise Brooks, a late silent film (1929) made in Germany but starring this American actress.
Louise Brooks, who, 70 years later turned out to be as intelligent a film writer/historian as the best of 'em, with her memoir "Lulu in Hollywood," was a post-flapper silent film actress of unbelievable beauty, a timeless sort of it that looks pretty modern today with her chopped, straight MTV hair and black-Goth eye makeup. Her acting had no relation to silent movie acting at all, no overblown gestures from theatre playing to the back row. She was like a great modern actor that convinces you they are a real person in the role, not an actor. You can't anticipate what she's going to do any more than you can a stranger.
The story sort of doesn't matter, although in its turgid German way, its deliberately degenerate world shows us gold-diggers, murderers, pimps, showgirls, bourgeois a-holes, and filmdom's very first attempted lesbian seduction. You watch this movie to watch the astonishing Louise Brooks in action, and you're mesmerized.
My favorite scene was when she was caught en flagrante by both the son and fiancee of her sugar daddy. She stops, looks up at them, and gives the most "cat caught with the canary in her mouth," utterly unashamed, knowing half-smirk. It is so modern a reaction, completely out of context for that world at that time, like "you're surprised I'm with him? That's your problem, not mine." Rent the movie. This is a fascinating female heroine to know about anyway, like Isak Dinesen. A beautiful, rebellious iconoclast who was a smart cookie in real life, a celebrated hottie (and purportedly a bit of a slut). Do you remember the scene in "Citizen Kane" where Jed Leland, Kane's best friend and drama critic, hates Kane's girlfriend's opera that he must review so much that he gets drunk, passes out, and Kane spitefully finishes the intended bad review himself, signs Leland's byline, and fires him? That's based upon "Citizen Kane"'s real scriptwriter, Herman Mankewiecz's real life experience with Louise Brooks. They saw a play, he passed out drunk, and she playfully wrote his review for him trying to imitate his prose style by using words like "paradigm." Which subsequently was published!
