Although she was “immortalized” in two 1929 German films of G.W. Pabst, Pandora's Box (see March 7) and Diary of a Lost Girl (coming April 12), Louise Brooks, born in Kansas in 1906, made some 22 films in the U.S. during a career that began in 1925 and ended abruptly in 1938. It is often said that her reputation - which flourished in Europe while it dwindled in the States after her enigmatic retreat from motion pictures in 1938 - was made by the Pabst films, that he essentially discovered her; but it was in her American films that he found her. Much of Brooks' critical acclaim fell (still falls) on her great beauty (“After Garbo, the most beautiful actress of the Twenties” --Andrew Sarris), but we can see in these American classics the unique personality described by Lotte Eisner as “a remarkable actress endowed with uncommon intelligence...” and by Henri Langlois as “the modern actress par excellence...(who) embodies...
