Quotes of the Day

She was a flapper in the 1920s, when Hollywood had hundreds of those pert girls. She made 15 silent movies in New York and Hollywood, none in the lead role. She went to Europe and starred in three films, none of which made an impression at the time. When she returned to America, ready to make her mark in talking pictures, the movie industry blackballed her. She was, she later recalled, invisible to the stars and moguls who had courted her a few years before. "It isn't that people turn their heads not to speak to you — they don't see you.... They look right at you and you don't exist." She made her last movie — a cheapo western with a pre-Stagecoach John Wayne — in 1938, and by 1946 she had to take a $40-a-week job as a sales girl at Saks Fifth Avenue.

That story, with minor alterations, could fit many women, perhaps most of them, who have come to Hollywood with dreams of stardom that never materialize. But if that were all there was to say about Louise Brooks, we would not be celebrating her centenary today. The Victoria Theatre in San Francisco would not be holding "Happy Birthday, Louise" party to accompany a performance of Lulu, a play based on her signature film Pandora's Box. The Criterion Collection would not be issuing a double-disc edition of the Pandora's Box DVD. And Rizzoli would not have published Louise Brooks; Lulu Forever, a handsome volume with more than 100 large photos and a warm consideration of her career by Peter Cowie. (Yes, that's the same Peter Cowie who wrote a Janus Films book that I reviewed last Friday. He's a one-man Book of the Week Club.)

Somehow, decades after her brief fame, in a last-minute rescue so late it was nearly post-mortem, Brooks triumphed. In 1953, Henri Langlois of Paris' Cinematheque Francaise spearheaded the revival of her reputation by proclaiming, "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!" The cue for his effusion was George Wilhelm Pabst's 1929 German melodrama Pandora's Box, in which Brooks plays Lulu, an innocent beguiler who radiates sexuality so unself-consciously toxic that it drives men mad — beyond lust, to disgrace and murder.

Received with no special enthusiasm in Europe, cut by censors into incoherence in the U.S., Pandora's Box had to wait a generation to find its audience. But when recognition for the film, and even more so for Brooks, did come, it didn't stop. The Anna Karina character in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie was based on her, as was Melanie Griffith's Lulu in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild. An adoring 1979 New Yorker profile by Kenneth Tynan (calling Brooks "the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid") cemented her celebrity, and suddenly the Rochester, N.Y., recluse was up in the silent-movie Pantheon with Garbo and Lillian Gish.

Brooks had gone to Rochester at the urging of James Card, head of the George Eastman House film division, where she busied herself in research on silent films. It was there she found a second career, writing memoir-essays on her early days. These trenchant pieces, on Chaplin and W. C. Fields, Gish and Garbo, and of course Pabst and Pandora's Box, were collected in the volume Lulu in Hollywood, and proved Brooks a stranger creature than the moguls could imagine: a beauty with a brain. The flapper could write!

Her movie image was part but not all of the Brooks legend. As a lovely young thing on Broadway, she was evicted from the Algonquin Hotel for promiscuous behavior. With her come-hither, go-thither allure, she was a magnet for famous men, and she frequently returned the favor, bedding Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, dozens more. "I was always a kept woman," she told Tynan. "Even when I was making a thousand dollars a week, I would always be paid for by George Marshall [owner of the Washington Redskins football team] or someone like that." In her last years in Hollywood, 1938-40, she recalled, "the only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me."

And even those stopped coming. A tart with a tart tongue (she once said, "If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife"), Brooks burned personal and career bridges like a child playing with matches. By her mid-40s she was broke, and without employers, friends or sugar daddies. She slept around until she was pretty much slept out. She contemplated suicide, then joined the Roman Catholic Church — although the young priest who instructed her in matters of the faith fell in love with her and was transferred to another parish.

In her last 30 years in Rochester, unrecognizable as the siren of yore — her hair gray, her face thin — Brooks attracted a coterie of film historians, to whom she recounted her screen and sexual adventures. A smart, once-beautiful showgirl talking about her affairs with the rich and famous — why wouldn't she entrance star-struck film critics and historians? They had to have been shocked and thrilled by her R-rated confessions. In the 1998 documentary Looking for Lulu, one friend, Bill Kuein says that Brooks "felt masturbation was the highest art form in the sexual area."

LULUBRICIOUS

A bright beauty with a bawdy mouth: that's something. But what did Brooks show on the screen that elevated a not very prominent actress into the empyrean?

Answer: One of the great expressive faces. It was of course beautiful, with black hair and wide unblinking eyes, but her gift was in the way she used those features. Or rather, didn't use them; there's no sense of manipulation when her character's mood shifts from gay to glum. She always found responses that were as subtle as they were powerful. She respected, or just assumed, the intelligence of her audience — to intuitively infer the thoughts and emotions running across that gorgeous face, percolating in that active mind. She gives the impressive of thinking without semaphoring the message: "Now I'm thinking."

In many of her American films as well as in Pandora's Box, Brooks played the sort of woman a respectable man both desires and fears, sees as his liberation and his doom. This can't have been far from the impact the actress had on the men she met. From outside and in, she encapsulated the tyranny and burden of beauty: its hold over those seized by it, its erosion of the person blessed or cursed by it.

On screen, Garbo could represent this with an acuity no one could match; but she, and we, knew it was acting. Brooks trumps Garbo without editorializing; she makes the process look natural. That's why, as Lulu, she is less the perpetrator of sexual chaos than its victim — a perfectly healthy young woman around whom men turn into beasts. As David Thomson writes of Pandora's Box: "Brooks in close-up gives a sense of vivacious, fatal intimacy that enormously enriches Lulu's tragedy."

From the journalists, and later the film critics, who wrote about her, Brooks summoned raptures. What, when drunk, they saw in Garbo, they saw in Brooks sober. A 1926 profile in Photoplay was hardly less rhapsodic than Tynan's, 53 years later: "She is so very Manhattan. Very young. Exquisitely hard-boiled. Her black hair and black eyes are as brilliant as Chinese lacquer. Her skin is white as a camellia. Her legs are lyric."

That's going too far. Her legs were prosaic. In fact, as we see when Brooks wears a skin-tight swim suit in A Girl in Every Port and Prix de beaute, she had what has to be called a manly body: broad shoulders, thick, muscular arms and thighs, and her "small, firm" (Brooks' own phrase) breasts less reminiscent of "two pears" (Chaplin's assessment) than of raisins. It happens that she suited the body style of the '20s, a decade that disdained big bosoms as much as ours insists on them.

But the face — that was forever fascinating, eternally modern. In the '20s, the '50s and today, hers in a face as contemporary as it is extraordinary. In her early films, Brooks was hired just to look pretty. She was not hired to look pretty 80 years later. But she does. Her acting, or behaving, is modern as well. From the beginning, she seemed to recognize that her magnetism was something that needn't be asserted, only displayed — a great star cannily judging her gifts.

But that's not what Brooks thought. She repeatedly claimed she was no actress. As for her famed beauty, she dismissed it. "That's why I was never an actress," she told Richard Leacock in the documentary Lulu in Berlin. "I was never in love with myself. I would go to a party and I would see Dolores Del Rio and Constance Talmadge and Constance Bennett, all these beautiful women, and I'd say, "You're the ugliest one here. You're black and furry, you've got freckles, your dress is not as attractive.' So, in the end, you can't be a great actress unless you think you're beautiful."

LORELEI LOUISE

For a certain insouciant kind of woman, the '20s was the age of sexual emancipation in popular literature and film: Sally Bowles and Clara Bow, Lorelei Lee and Louise Brooks. Women had just got the vote in the U.S., and now they had the moves. Brooks was made for this medium, this decade.

Born Nov. 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, Kan., and raised in Wichita, by a lawyer father and a free-thinking suffragette with literary ambitions, Mary Louise Brooks was dancing at social events from the age of six. Ever precocious, she left home at 16 for New York to join Ruth St. Denis' and Ted Shawn's Denishawn modern dance company. That led to dancer-showgirl stints with George White's Scandals and The Ziegfeld Follies and, when she was still 18, a contract with Paramount Pictures, New York branch.

She got important supporting roles in A pictures like The Show Off with Ford Sterling and It's the Old Army Game with Fields. "She made a flurry of comedies in which she was a capricious femme fatale," Thomson writes, "playing with a reserve that unfailingly monopolized attention amid so much mugging." Then she was brought to Hollywood for more substantial fare.

In 1928 she was lent out to Fox for A Girl in Every Port, in which the young director Howard Hawks created the prototype for a fable he would elaborate on over the next 40 years: the love story between two men. Victor McLaglen and Robert Armstrong are sailors who whore and brawl their way through shore leave until McLaglen spots Brooks, as Godiva the Diver in her one-piece, plummeting from her high perch into a shallow pool. He falls for her, not realizing that Armstrong had been her beau a million miles away in Coney Island. (Of all the dive joints in all the world, he has to walk into this one.) As McLaglen polishes Brooks' shoe, she runs her hand through his hair, over his arm and down his leg. The slut! Armstrong renounces her, saying of McLaglen, "That big ox means more to me than any woman." Brooks is only the foil here, but her naturalness exposes the inanity of the male-bonding theme. Any man who'd choose luggish McLaglen over the beautiful Brooks is not worth having.

Much more solid was Brooks' next film, back at Paramount. Beggars of Life was based on a novel by hobo-author Jim Tully, and directed by William A. Wellman, who was fresh from Wings, the aerial drama that would win the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Its first scenes show Brooks at her Hollywood best. A tramp (Richard Arlen) comes into a house and begs for food from a seated man with his back to the door. Arlen moves closer and sees that the man is dead, with blood running down his face. A noise on the floor above introduces Brooks, who creeps down the stairs to tell her story: of how the man adopted her out of an orphans' home; how he abused her and, this morning, tried to rape her; how, when pressed against a wall, she reached back for a shotgun and killed him, All this is related in tellingly suggestive images superimposed over Brooks' gravely animated face. It's silent-film art at its most evocative, and Brooks inhabits every emotion of misery, anger and fear.

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 beauté, 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 beauté, 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."

• Richard Corliss
• Celebrating the centenary of Louise Brooks, the movies’ great unknown flapper