Lulu-Louise at 100

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American actress Louise Brooks.

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To escape an inequitable but inevitable murder change, Brooks and Arlen hit the rails, she clothed in a man's shirt, trousers and cap. She's famished, but she can't eat the food Arlen took from her home, and which she presumably prepared for the man she killed. He has lived on the road (the movie anticipated many more in the '30s about the homeless), but she is unsuited to the train-hopping and the rough camaraderie of bindlestiffs, especially when they discover she's a woman. She doesn't want more of what she got at home.

In its second half, the movie gets pretty conventional. Another tramp, tough Wallace Beery, commandeers the gang and threatens to steal Brooks from Arlen. But under his rags, he can be noble — a member of the hobocracy — and facilitates an improbable happy ending. Beggars of Life was an unusually solemn project for Brooks, and her character must tilt from plaintive hoyden to, at the end, a child bride dressed in Gish garb. But she proves she can be earnest and yearning and winsome every bit as convincingly as she is cool and seductive and corrosive.

THE CURSE OF LULU

Brooks' next picture was The Canary Murder Case, in which she played the Canary. As in A Girl in Every Port, she a showgirl floating above the crowd, this time on a swing — an object for men to look up at and covet. Her contract with Paramount was coming to an end, so she skitted off to Berlin to play Lulu in Pandora's Box.

A free-spirited flirt who begins the movie in Berlin entertaining the meter-reader and ends in London in the arms of Jack the Ripper, Lulu brings out the worst in all her men — foremost among them a scrofulous pimp who may be her father and a newspaper publisher (Fritz Kortner) and his son (Franz Lederer). She marries the publisher, who becomes enraged on their wedding night and insists she kill herself. The gun goes off, and he's dead. At her trial she's a symphony in black in her widow's weeds, but she's able to flash a becoming smile at the prosecutor, who for a flustered moment forgets he's supposed to demand that she be given the death penalty.

Pabst, who was close to hiring Marlene Dietrich before Brooks said yes, knew that the Germans would be outraged that an American flapper was playing their Lulu, a character that was nearly a national icon. (Imagine the flap in Britain if this were announced: Brad Pitt is James Bond.) But they couldn't resist Brooks' fresh approach, which painted Lulu as a naif with bad taste in beaux. A carnal Candide, a blithe arsonist of men's hearts, she has no calculation in her, just a knowing or beckoning smile. Her face makes a kind of smile when she's crying too, as if even the pain a man can inflict on her is a game played according to her rules. Great screen acting is hard to define but a cinch to spot. That's Brooks in Pandora. Hers is the art that conceals art, the beauty that reveals it.

She followed Pandora with Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl, where she's Thiamine, an innocent girl suffering under men's predations — lots of them. The story is like a Dickens novel but with plenty of sex. Her father gets all his serving girls pregnant; his assistant gets Thiamine pregnant; the reform school she's sent to is run by a hairless sadist and his weird wife, who comes to orgasm beating a drum while the girls do their calisthenics. And that's just the first half-hour.

While in Europe, Brooks was called home by Paramount. Talkies had come in, and the studio needed to loop and reshoot some scenes for sound. She refused. That snapped it. Paramount hired actress Margaret Livingstone to dub her dialogue, and Brooks had sassed herself onto a blacklist. She had often expressed her contempt for Hollywood, and soon the town would return that sour flavor. She was always a handful, making enemies of the showgirls she worked with and, I suspect, having little control over the booze she loved. Augusto Genina, who directed her in Prix de beaut, wrote in his memoirs that she drank all day and night and had to be carried on to the set. "She would have been the ultimate actress," he declared, "if it hadn't been for the alcohol."

When Brooks did return to Hollywood, most of the town considered her anathema. Wellman did supposedly offer the role eventually taken by Jean Harlow in The Public Enemy, but Brooks says she turned it down. Instead, she made a Grade-Z short, Windy Riles Goes Hollywood, directed by the disgraced Fatty Arbuckle, then made a few more furtive, insultingly small appearances in movies. Sometimes her scenes were cut out of the film. She ended her career staring up at Wayne in Overland Stage Raiders and seemingly out of her element, her refeened voice clashing with the homey cliches and the guy who has a sassy puppet on his arm. Her final words in a Hollywood movie: "Try to keep me away!" She left for good two years later.

In a way, Brooks made her own happy ending, before she died in Rochester in 1985, at 78. She had cultivated her legend, finding new adherents who treated her with the kind of awe she hadn't been granted in decades, and then only in bedrooms. But I'll give Lulu-Louise a tragic-happy ending. At the climax of the 1930 Prix de beaut, she is a movie star sitting in a screening room about to watch the rushes of her big song. (It's the sad, teasing "Je n'ai qu'un Amour c'est Toi," and, in another 100th birthday present, is covered on the new CD by World Musette, a Paris band fronted by the cartoonist Robert Crumb.) Her jealous lover creeps into the projection booth and, from there, shoots her dead. Brooks' face goes lifeless as her screen image lives. And the song ends: "Don't think I'm untrue / My only love is you / Don't be demanding / Be understanding ... / My only love is you."

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