A tale of radical sexual freedom contrasted to pathologically decayed bourgeois morality in Germany of the late twenties, Diary of a Lost Girl was G.W. Pabst's last silent, and his second masterpiece with American actress Louise Brooks. It is even more provocative in subject matter than the first (Pandora's Box), and shot, like Pandora's Box, for the psychological and the ironic angle, but Diary of a Lost Girl “displays a new, almost documentary restraint” (Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen).
Brooks plays a girl from a bourgeois milieu in which sexuality explodes only through repressed channels, family honor takes precedence over integrity, and the sexually active woman takes the fall. When she bears a child out of wedlock, she is shunted off to a hideously oppressive home for delinquent girls, while her seducer is kept on as an assistant to her pharmacist father. She finally finds refuge in the genuine compassion of the madam of a bordello.
Diary of a Lost Girl was ruthlessly attacked by press and censors alike, and Pabst was forced to shoot an alternate ending. In addition, the film suffered merciless cuts after its release.