Mysterious Object of Desire

It can be hard to get past the mythos surrounding the infamous star of "Pandora's Box." But who would want to? Opening today for a two-week run at Film Forum, the 1928 German classic of ruinous desire showcases the apocalyptic charms of the bewitchingly bobbed Louise Brooks - an unforgettable silent-screen icon who, ironically, was almost forgotten.

People fussed over Brooks from the outset, but not always out of affection. German moviegoers mocked director G.W. Pabst's decision to cast an American actress in the lead role of Lulu, an already beloved character from two scandalous plays by Franz Wedekind. In America, censorship cuts rendered the movie just another melodrama to be panned and discarded, which it was.

But the poster girl in waiting for the pleasure-dome '20s cast her spell eventually. Cinephiles breathed life back into the legend starting in the 1950s, mainly through panting. "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!" Henri Langlois, famed programmer of the Cinematheque Francaise raved. "The only star actress I can imagine either being enslaved by or wanting to enslave," the critic Kenneth Tynan recounted in a 1979 New Yorker profile that sparked renewed interest.

I quote the fans because they speak the way Lulu's tragic suitor acts. Dr. Schon, the powerful editor in "Pandora's Box," plans to marry respectably, but he cannot resist his mistress's seductive pull (nor can his son, Alwa, played by Frances Lederer). All Lulu has to do is lie back on a chaise longue and say the magic words: "You'll have to kill me if you want to be free of me."

Here and everywhere, Brooks is a bracingly free spirit - a spinning swan-necked beauty of both curves and angles, like an Art Deco human, totemic and modern. She's sleek, sexy, and palpably more alive than the comparatively lumbering actors around her. Smirking, alert, she at times seems to be tending to dumb beasts, including Schon.

Despite Schon's resolutions, we know it's only a matter of time before he's caught in flagrante delicto by his fiancee. (It happens backstage at a variety show organized by Schon's son, in a series of scenes full of Lulu-like impressionistic whirls of action.) Doomed and conscious of it, Schon submits himself to marrying his mistress. At the wedding reception, she parties with an old pimp and another dopey pal in the bridal suite.

Schon chases the low-lifes off and it is here, halfway through the film, that the powerful conjoining of sex and death peaks. In an electrifying scene, Schon hands Lulu a gun and asks her to kill herself (taking her at her earlier word). The two struggle; Schon's massive back fills the screen, blocking the action. Mr. Pabst signals the gunshot with smoke rising; a moment later, Schon slumps over.

The prosecutor at the murder trial gives Lulu her Pandora moniker, but upon catching her eye, he can't help lapsing into a dopey smile. He straightens up and half-heartedly renews his scolding, in a quiet moment that captures the perversity at the heart of the Lulu phenomenon: uptight men blaming a woman's beauty for their own unmanageable sexual desires, frightening yet vexingly pleasurable.

For the rest of the movie, Lulu is literally the outlaw that, in the eyes of the disapproving, she always was. She hides in the demimonde, always at risk of discovery by police. By the end, the life of the party, huddling in a garret, is trapped in shadows and rags, but even then, she finds time for one last fateful frolic.

Fortunately, Brooks ultimately escaped the oblivion of her most famous creation (though she did prove, in Mr. Tynan's New Yorker profile, to have all the verve of her screen persona). It's hard to imagine such a dynamic presence flickering out of fashion for long, but the Film Forum revival, on the centenary of Brooks's birth, will, one hopes, ensure the creation of a few new candidates for the happily enslaved.

Until June 29 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212- 727-8112).