Lulu in Motown, Louise Brooks in Detroit

Back on December 8, 2006, I had the honor of introducing Pandora's Box before a screening of the film at the Detroit Film Theatre in Detroit, Michigan. Located within the Detroit Institute of Arts,
this historic venue was the first museum theater in the United States to screen film as art, prior
to similar screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was an honor as well as a pleasure to introduce the film, as I had grown up in metro Detroit and to this day, the D.I.A. remains one of my very favorite art museums. 

The following piece is adapted from my 2006 introductory remarks. They are, if I may suggest, remarks to keep in mind when Pandora's Box is shown at the historic Senate Theater (6424 Michigan Avenue in Detroit) on March 22. (See the prior LBS blog post for further details.)

Before I say something about Pandora’s Box, I thought I might speak a little bit about Louise Brooks and her relationship with the Motor City. Yes, the gods do sometimes walk among us.  

Before she became an actress, Louise Brooks was a dancer. For more than two years, Brooks was a member of—and toured with—Denishawn, the leading modern American dance company of the teens and twenties. Led by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, the company included a who’s who of those who would shape modern dance in America. During the 1922-23 and 1923-24 seasons, the future actress—then still a teenager—danced alongside such legendary figures as Martha Graham, Charles Weideman, and Doris Humphrey. 

The company came to Detroit twice—first in March of 1923, and then again in March of 1924. As a member of Denishawn, Louise Brooks performed at Orchestra Hall, the current home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. According to contemporary accounts, the company enjoyed large crowds and received favorable reviews. 

Dance would play an important part in Brooks’ life. In the opening scene in Pandora’s Box, the actress performs a short dance—something Brooks had recalled from an earlier Denishawn routine. Later in life she would remark, “I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.” 

It was an actress, however, that Louise Brooks made her greatest impression on the Motor City—especially its film critics. In the 1920’s, Detroit was a three paper town. There was the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, as well as the now defunct Detroit Times. Also covering the local arts and entertainment scene—including motion pictures—was a weekly called Detroit Saturday Night. Each of these publications reviewed new films, and each usually went out of its way to say something good or interesting about Louise Brooks. 

For example, Charles J. Richardson of the Detroit Times, in reviewing The American Venus—a somewhat risqué 1926 comedy which first brought Louise Brooks to public notice—stated “Louise Brooks, the former Follies chorine, makes her film debut in the production and does well in a small role. This Miss Brooks just now is the patron saint of all chorus girls seeking admittance into the sacred ranks of screen players.” That’s not a bad write-up for a first screen credit. 

Harold Hefferman, writing in the Detroit News, had also noticed the young actress in her first big role. He wrote “Louise Brooks, a black-haired boyish-bobbed entry . . . cuts quite a figure.” Indeed, throughout the 1920’s, Harold Hefferman would lavish praise on the actress time and again. The Detroit News critic nearly gushed while reviewing her next film, A Social Celebrity. “Louise Brooks, possessing one of the most striking and expressive faces ever to come to the screen, plays the heroine in a saucily successful manner.” 

Meanwhile, Hefferman’s journalistic rival, Charles J. Richardson, continued to express similar sentiments in his reviews for the Detroit Times. In writing about the 1927 comedy, Rolled Stockings, Richardson stated bluntly “Louise Brooks, as usual, is delightful to gaze upon.” Back then, critics sometimes wore their hearts on their sleeves. 

Admiration for the actress was not limited to the city’s male critics. During the 1920’s, Ella H. McCormick of the Detroit Free Press repeatedly singled out the actress. “Louise Brooks is the nifty stepper” she would write in May, 1926. A month later, reviewing It’s the Old Army Game, McCormick observed “W. C. Fields scored a splendid triumph in this picture. A great part of the success of the offering, however, is due to Louise Brooks, who takes the lead feminine part.” At year’s end, in her review of the December 1926 release, Just Another Blonde, McCormick would state “Miss Brooks is one of the best brunette contradictions to the lighter hypothesis that can be found on the silver screen.” 

In the mid-1930’s, as her film career began fade, Louise Brooks returned to dance— and once again returned to Detroit. With a partner, Brooks performed as a ballroom dancer in night clubs, theaters, and other Midwest and East Coast hotspots. In August of 1934, Louise Brooks danced at the Blossom Heath Inn on Jefferson Avenue. Today, that venue—which is located between 9 and 10 mile road—hosts weddings and bridal fairs, but back then the Blossom Heath Inn was a well known road-house which hosted prominent touring acts. 

At the time of her month-long engagement in what would become St. Clair Shores, both the Free Press and News ran the following notice in the night-club column of their respective papers. “Edward Fritz, proprietor of the Blossom Heath Inn, announces the engagement of the season’s greatest floor show, headed by Louise Brooks, motion picture star, and Dario, creator of the Bolero from the motion picture Bolero. Several other new acts are included.” It was an unimpressive dénouement to a remarkable career. Within a few years, Louise Brooks would appear in her last film, leave Hollywood, and sink into decades of obscurity. 

But things changed. Louise Brooks and her great European films—Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, and Prix de beauté—were rediscovered. Today, the actress is best known for the role as Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 masterpiece. In his rather thoughtful article in this week’s Metro Times, Michael Hastings noted: “Has there ever been a more perfect, more tragic, more mythic fusion of actor and character than Louise Brooks’ Lulu in Pandora’s Box? The girl with the “black helmet” hairdo may not have been German, and she certainly didn’t go on a date with Jack the Ripper, but just about everything else in Brooks’ life leading up to and following her signature 1929 role became, in some weird, extrasensory way, the blueprint for director G.W. Pabst’s masterpiece of sexual suggestion.” 

Despite Louise Brooks’ now legendary status, there are those who have questioned her art. In her classic book about German expressionist film entitled, The Haunted Screen, historian Lottie Eisner asked, “Was Louise Brooks a great artist—or only a dazzling creature whose beauty leads the spectator to endow her with complexities of which she herself was unaware?” That’s a good, even provocative question—as it lies at the heart of the debate still surrounding the actress. 

When a heavily censored Pandora’s Box made its American debut in December of 1929, the critic for the New York Times wrote “Miss Brooks is attractive—and she moves her head and eyes at the proper moment, but whether she is endeavoring to express joy, woe, anger or satisfaction—it is often difficult to decide.” The N.Y. Herald Tribune added, “Louise Brooks acts vivaciously but with a seeming blindness as to what it is all about.” Other reviews were just as damning. 

Critics then—and critics today—call her talent into question. Is Louise Brooks a great actress?—or only someone who fools the audience and gets by on her looks? 

Admittedly, Louise Brooks is something of a problem in film history. She is unique among movie icons in that no other actress has made such an impact with so few films. Part of the problem is that a quarter of her films are lost. And today, Brooks’ reputation rests almost unfairly on one role—that of Lulu, a prototypical femme fatale in this 77-year-old film by G.W. Pabst.  

When a revised edition of The Haunted Screen was published in 1957, Lottie Eisner answered the question she had posed just a few years before. Then, in writing about the two films Brooks made with Pabst, Eisner asked if Brooks was a great artist. Now, revising her text, Eisner wrote something just as provocative: “Her gifts of profound intuition may seem purely passive to an inexperienced audience, yet she succeeded in stimulating an otherwise unequal director’s talent to the extreme. Pabst’s remarkable evolution must thus be seen as an encounter with an actress who needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence. Louise Brooks, always enigmatically impassive, overwhelmingly exists throughout these two films. We know now that Louise Brooks is a remarkable actress endowed with uncommon intelligence, and not merely a dazzlingly beautiful woman.”

More about Pandora's Box can be found on the newly revamped Louise Brooks Society website on its Pandora's Box (filmography page).

THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original contents copyright © 2025. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.