Pandora's Box is loosely adapted from two Wedekind plays comprising the “Lulu” tragedy. The story deals with a beautiful, amoral woman who destroys all those who come under her spell, but who, as a Soho prostitute, falls victim to Jack the Ripper. Under Pabst's direction, the film is a masterpiece of atmosphere, camera movement and editing; it is also one of the most sexually charged films ever made, due largely to the incendiary performance of the American actress Louise Brooks, whose profound talents were discovered by Pabst, and whose genius, legendary in Europe, has been rediscovered during the last few years in America. Writing of “the miracle of Louise Brooks,” the eminent German film critic Lotte Eisner noted, “Brooks, always enigmatically impassive, overwhelmingly exists throughout these films (Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl). We know that Louise Brooks is a remarkable actress endowed with uncommon intelligence, and not merely a dazzlingly beautiful woman.”
In a recent reassessment of Pandora's Box, Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris calls G. W. Pabst “prematurely Freudian,” and continues: “By suggesting everything and delivering nothing, Hollywood movies have traditionally tantalized intellectuals.... Enter G. W. Pabst with an unusually developed flair for eros in the cinema even for a European. He is not such an overt iconoclast as Stroheim and Buñuel, nor as witty and as elegant a witness to sexual folly as Lubitsch, nor as strongly driven to grandiose designs of erotic domination as Lang. Pabst is more the urbane analyst, bemused by the desires depicted in his films, occasionally even enchanted by them, but never hypocritical about his own complicity in the spectacle....”