"There is no Garbo!
There is no Dietrich!
There is only Louise Brooks!"
Henri Langlois
Like James Dean, Louise Brooks had an impact on popular culture that transcended her relatively brief career. Unlike Dean, Brooks lived a long time after her movie career was over.
She was born into a middle-class family in Kansas in 1906. Her father was a lawyer. A precocious kid and a dancing prodigy, she was shipped off to New York at 15, and performed with a modern dance company before moving on to George White's Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies. She was also a party girl, a fun-loving flapper whose sexual adventures included a legendary encounter with Charlie Chaplin while he was in New York to promote "The Gold Rush".
She started getting small parts in films, and the parts were getting bigger when Austrian director G.W. Pabst spotted her and decided she'd be perfect to play Lulu, the self-destructive heroine in "Pandora's Box". She made two pictures for Pabst in Berlin and another movie in Paris, but when she got back to Hollywood, she found she'd burned a few too many bridges and nobody would hire her. She played bit parts and made a couple of B westerns, and in 1938, she quit.
On screen, with her trademark helmet hairdo and uninhibited sexuality, she was incandescent, and her acting stands out in the silent era for its instinctive minimalism. She appeared in about two dozen movies. In some, her roles are so tiny, they hardly matter, and some of her pictures are lost. Here's a selection:
"The Show Off" (1926/Malcolm St. Clair)
Brooks has a key supporting role in a comedy starring Ford Sterling, the former Keystone Kop.
"It's the Old Army Game" (1926/A. Edward Sutherland)
Brooks shares the screen with W.C. Fields, her pal from the Ziegfeld Follies. Fields remade this in the sound era as "It's a Gift".
"Beggars of Life" (1928/William Wellman)
Brooks plays a woman on the run from the law, riding the rails and memorably disguised as a boy.
"A Girl In Every Port" (1928/Howard Hawks)
Robert Armstrong and Victor McLaglen play sailors. Brooks plays the carnival artist who comes between them. This is the movie that made Pabst cast Brooks as Lulu.
"The Canary Murder Case" (1929/Malcolm St. Clair)
Brooks plays a blackmailing showgirl in a murder mystery starring William Powell as Philo Vance.
"Pandora's Box" (1929/G.W. Pabst)
Brooks plays Lulu, a seductive free spirit whose life spirals down through a series of reckless relationships, the last of them with Jack the Ripper. Her signature role.
"Diary of a Lost Girl" (1929/G.W. Pabst)
Brooks goes through even more hell in her second movie for Pabst.
"Prix de Beauté" (1930/Augusto Genina)
An early French sound film with Brooks as a typist who wins the Miss France beauty contest. Quentin Tarantino reworked its ironic conclusion toward the end of "Inglourious Basterds".
"Windy Riley Goes Hollywood" (1931/Roscoe Arbuckle)
A dismal two-reel comedy with Louise as a movie star whose tabloid life off-camera could derail her career. She and her director could both relate to that.
"Overland Stage Raiders" (1938/George Sherman)
Brooks' last screen appearance, a routine, low-budget western starring John Wayne.
After Hollywood, things fell apart. She toured as a dancer, married and divorced, opened a dance studio in Wichita, and eventually found herself back in New York, working as a sales clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue. She became a recluse and slipped into a marginal existence whose main components were alcohol and prostitution, a dark period that lasted several years. (When Pabst predicted that Brooks would end up like Lulu, he wasn't far off the mark.)
Then, in the mid-1950s, the French rediscovered her movies, and eventually the word reached the States. The film historian James Card tracked her down and got her to move to Rochester, New York, where she embarked on a new career, writing about film. Her writing was sharp, and her book of essays, "Lulu In Hollywood", is a classic.
Several documentaries have been made about Brooks. "Looking For Lulu", written by Barry Paris and narrated by Shirley MacLaine, is a good one. Her life story would be great material for a biopic, but except for "The Chaperone", a 2018 film about her early days in New York, nobody has tried to do that, and finding an actress who could bring to the screen what she did would be tough.
It's been said that there are no second acts in American life, but Louise Brooks contradicts that. She died in Rochester in 1985. She was 78.
"I learned how to act by watching Martha
Graham dance, and I learned how to
dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act."
Louise Brooks
