All film faces, director G. W. Pabst must have known, are two-way mirrors. In Pandora's Box, Louise Brooks' impassive, enigmatic visage is a wide-eyed reflecting pool for the sexual depravity which her beauty seems to inspire and which, in the end, haunts her. The key to Brooks' Lulu is the artless amorality with which she destroys all who come under her spell; her indifference is at once distancing and magnetic, qualities which Pabst used ingeniously. In the film's most glowing scene, amid the feverish, shimmering sensuality of the backstage bustle, Brooks emerges (as Lotte Eisner has written) "like some pagan idol," throwing the background out of focus, perhaps because the whole of the film is contained in that face.