Rating: 1/2
by Derek Smith 2/15/06

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Pandora's Box represents one of the great films about the mysterious allure of the female form and the destructive power of the male gaze that's inflicted upon it.  In Louise Brooks, we have a woman whose mere glance or curl of the lips exudes a sexual energy unmatched by any actress, save for Marlene Dietrich, in pre-World War II cinema.  Her ability to bring men to their knees comes not from a desire to dominate them, but a need to be loved by them alone.  It is through this perspective that the film analyzes and condemns the uncontrolled impulses of man rather than the exhuberant but natural sexuality of its star.  Brooks is no saint, in the film or in her real life, but she makes a genuine attempt to clean up her act for her first lover and in return is blamed for his murder after he forces his gun upon her and is accidentally shot.  The wonderfully expressionistic imagery, which takes hold from that scene on, captures her helpless fear as death becomes the only way he can escape her.  After managing to escape once sentenced to death, she becomes a sex object transferred among men, given as much consideration as the money being pushed across the tables in the gambling hall.  She is an object who, at the will of the men who now control her, is to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.  Pabst creates a communal misogyny which threatens to dehumanize her, reducing her once liberating feminine power to a bargaining chip and ultimately an excuse for her disposal.  His frank treatment of the unhealthy aspects of the male view of women is revolutionary in 1929 as is his proposition that the danger of the overt sexual tendencies of the Jazz Age lie not in women's ability to overpower men, but men crumbling from within.  All shown without the slightest bit of moralizing, Pandora's Box stands as a great early feminist work where women suffer for the sin's of man.  The angelic white of her wedding gown to the raven black of the gown she wears in mourning are the extremes which female sexuality - only virgin's and whores - is dealt with.  This oversimplification is why those unwilling to accept submission were sacrificed and outcast as a reminder of the danger they present to men, whose failure to curb sexual impulses is considered inherent to their make up, while the women who tempted are worthy only of disposal.