Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, screens in Denver

This just in .... 

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), starring Louise Brooks, will be shown in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, September 14th. This late afternoon screening is one of a number of films being shown as part of the Denver Silent Film Festival. More information about this screening, which will feature live musical accompaniment, can be found HERE.

And here is what the festival has to say about the event. "Louise Brooks was far less than the international phenomenon she became when she first arrived in Germany in 1926  1928 to make the scandalous Pandora’s Box with Pabst. Diary mounted another serious attack on bourgeois German morality with its story of a young girl raped, and sent to a morally rigid “reform school” from which she escapes and eventually works in a brothel before finding a way to rise in social standing."

Musical accompaniment by Rodney Sauer.

Diary of a Lost Girl will be shown at the Sie Film Center, Denver's Only Independent Movie Theater, located at 2510 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80206

For more information about Diary of a Lost Girl, be sure and visit the Louise Brooks Society filmography page devoted to the film.

Want to learn even more? Back in 2010, the Louise Brooks Society published the "Louise Brooks edition" of Margarete Bohme's The Diary of a Lost Girl, the book the film was based on. It's a sensational read. Order your copy today at amazon.com

The 1929 Louise Brooks film, Diary of a Lost Girl, is based on a controversial and bestselling book first published in Germany in 1905. Though little known today, it was a literary sensation at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of the 1920s, it had been translated into 14 languages and sold more than 1,200,000 copies - ranking it among the bestselling books of its time.

Was it - as many believed - the real-life diary of a young woman forced by circumstance into a life of prostitution? Or a sensational and clever fake, one of the first novels of its kind? This contested work - a work of unusual historical significance as well as literary sophistication - inspired a sequel, a play, a parody, a score of imitators, and two silent films. The best remembered of these is the oft revived G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks.

This corrected and annotated edition of the original English language translation brought this important book back into print after more than 100 years. It includes an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society, detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929 silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more than three dozen vintage illustrations.

REVIEWS OF THE LOUISE BROOKS SOCIETY EDITION:

"In today's parlance this would be called a movie tie-in edition, but that seems a rather glib way to describe yet another privately published work that reveals an enormous amount of research and passion." - Leonard Maltin 

"Long relegated to the shadows, Margarete Böhme's 1905 novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl has at last made a triumphant return. In reissuing the rare 1907 English translation of Böhme's German text, Thomas Gladysz makes an important contribution to film history, literature, and, in as much as Böhme told her tale with much detail and background contemporary to the day, sociology and history. He gives us the original novel, his informative introduction, and many beautiful and rare illustrations. This reissue is long overdue, and in all ways it is a volume of uncommon merit." - Richard Buller, author of A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran

"Read today, it's a fascinating time-trip back to another age, and yet remains compelling. As a bonus, Gladysz richly illustrates the text with stills of Brooks from the famous film." - Jack Garner, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 

"Thomas Gladysz is the leading authority on all matters pertaining to the legendary Louise Brooks. We owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing the groundbreaking novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl, back from obscurity." --Lon Davis, author of Silent Lives

"It was such a pleasure to come upon your well documented and beautifully presented edition." -- Elizabeth Boa, University of Nottingham

 

REVIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION:

"The saddest of modern books." - Nelson Evening Mail (1909)

The "poignant story of a great-hearted girl who kept her soul alive amidst all the mire that surrounded her poor body." - Hall Caine (1907)

"There are many readers, however, who find it very shocking, and Mr. Bram Stoker, the advocate of book censoring . . . would ban it promptly." - New York Times (1907)

"The fact that one German critic asserted the impossibility of a woman herself immune from vice having written such a book, is proof that besides truth of matter there was compelling art in Margarete Böhme's book." - Percival Pollard (1909)

"The moral justification of such a publication is to be found in the fact that it shrivels up sentimentality; the weak thing cannot stand and look at such stark degradation." - Manchester Guardian (1907)

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

Louise Brooks film It's the Old Army Game to screen in Denver, Colorado

Louise Brooks is happy to return to Denver, where she first appeared in person in 1922
as a member of the Denishawn Dance Company

After a two-year hiatus, the Denver Silent Film Festival is set to return with a series of screenings at the Sturm Family Auditorium inside the Denver Botanic Gardens in Denver, Colorado. This year's festival theme, "We Need to Laugh," features 11 short and feature-length comedies from the silent film era including the must see Louise Brooks / W.C. Fields film, It's the Old Army Game (1926).

The Denver Silent Film Festival was established in September, 2010. Its mission is to present a broad spectrum of silent films by programming "a lively and thought-provoking mix of educational and entertaining films" including American and foreign classics, as well as lesser-known rare and restored films. However, like much of the world, things have been on hold during the Covid pandemic. More information about this year's event can be found HERE.

Here is the line-up of films, each of which features live musical accompaniment:

May 20 - The Cameraman (1928) with Musical Accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra

May 21 - Comedy Shorts Package with Musical Accompaniment by The Dollhouse Thieves

May 21 - The Strong Man (1926) with Musical Accompaniment by Hank Troy

May 21 - Max the Circus King (1924) with Musical Accompaniment by the CAM Student Orchestra with Donald Sosin & Joanna Seaton

May 21 - It's the Old Army Game (1926) with Musical Accompaniment by Hank Troy, and an introduction by DSFF’s David Shepard Honoree Richard Koszarski

May 22 - Two Timid Souls  / Les Deux Timides (1928) with Musical Accompaniment by Rodney Sauer

May 22 - So This Is Paris (1926) with Musical Accompaniment by Hank Troy

May 22 - The Kid Brother (1927) with Musical Accompaniment by Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton 

It’s the Old Army Game is a comedy about a small town druggist (played by W.C. Fields) who gets involved with a real estate scam. Louise Brooks plays the druggist’s assistant. The film was Brooks’ fourth, and it reunited her with Fields, the film’s star. The two had worked together in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1925.

It’s the Old Army Game received mostly positive reviews, though some critics noted its somewhat thin plot. Algonquin Round Table playwright Robert E. Sherwood (who would go on to win four Pulitzer Prizes and an Academy Award) was then writing reviews for Life magazine. His pithy critique read, “Mr. Fields has to carry the entire production on his shoulders, with some slight assistance from the sparkling Louise Brooks.” Ella H. McCormick of the Detroit Free Press echoed Sherwood with “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.”

When It's the Old Army Game first played in Denver, Colorado in June of 1926, Betty Craig previewed the film in the Denver Post. She singled out Brooks, noting “In the meantime the young fellow from the big town has fallen in love with the lovely creature that serves as the store’s only clerk, who is none other than the captivating Louise Brooks.” The following day, Craig penned her review, stating “W. C. Fields is very amusing, and Louise Brooks, featured with Mr. Fields, gives a dandy performance.”

The film, especially its interiors, were shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studios on Long Island (located at 3412 36th Street in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens), and in Manhattan. Location shooting, including exteriors, was done in Ocala and Palm Beach, Florida in late February and March, 1926. (Ocala is an inland farming community near Gainesville, Florida.) 

For this special Denver Silent Film Festival screening, the film will be introduced by Richard Kosarski, the leading authority on film production at Paramount's Astoria studio. Koszarski not only interviewed Louise Brooks about her East Coast film work, but has authored two related, must read books, Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff and The Astoria Studio and Its Fabulous Films: A Picture History with 227 Stills and Photographs. At the recent San Francisco Silent Film Festival, I had the chance to meet Richard Koszarski and his wife Diane, and talk with them about their work (and Louise Brooks). It was an honor.

 

I would enjoy hearing from anyone who attends the festival and the It's the Old Army Game screening.

Today: Louise Brooks' in Beggars of Life screens in Greeley, Colorado

Later today, the sensational 1928 Louise Brooks' film Beggars of Life will be shown in Greeley, Colorado with live musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (pictured below). This 2 pm screening will take place at the Hensel Phelps Theatre - 701 10th Ave, Greeley, CO 80631. More information about this event may be found HERE.

In this gripping film set in American hobo subculture, Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen take to riding the rails to escape a manslaughter charge. Pre-depression America is shown as a place of formless threats and constant danger. Long unavailable, Beggars of Life was recently restored by the George Eastman Museum, and is now widely regarded as Louise Brooks’ finest American film.

This silent film will be accompanied by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Based in Louisville, Colorado, this quintet has become famous for its sensitive and powerful resurrection of the lost repertoire played by silent film orchestras. Through live appearances throughout America and dozens of recordings, the Mont Alto orchestra shows that the golden age of Hollywood music actually came before “talkies.” Mont Alto will be performing the score that they were commissioned to record for the recent Blu-ray release of this film on the Kino-Lorber label.

“…in “Beggars of Life,” Rodney Sauer and company are once again authoritative and expressively pitch-perfect. But the players are not there to lead, distract or showboat, but to underscore, strictly in partnership with the film.” — Bright Lights Film Journal.

Want to learn more about Louise Brooks and Beggars of Life? My book, Beggars of Life: A Companion to the 1928 Film, as well as the DVD / Blu-ray of the film from Kino Lorber, are the perfect compliment to one another. And what's more, the DVD, featuring the best copy of the film available anywhere as well as the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra score, also includes an informative commentary by your's truly!

My 106-page book on Beggars of Life looks at the film Oscar-winning director William Wellman thought his finest silent movie. Based on Jim Tully’s bestselling book of hobo life—and filmed by Wellman the year after he made Wings (the first film to win the Best Picture Oscar), Beggars of Life is a riveting drama about an orphan girl (played by Louise Brooks) who kills her abusive stepfather and flees the law. She meets a boy tramp (leading man Richard Arlen), and together they ride the rails through a dangerous hobo underground ruled over by Oklahoma Red (future Oscar winner Wallace Beery). Beggars of Life showcases Brooks in her best American silent—a film the Cleveland Plain Dealer described as “a raw, sometimes bleeding slice of life.” This first ever study of Beggars of Life includes more than 50 little seen images, and a foreword by actor and author William Wellman, Jr. (the director's son).

If you haven't secured a copy of either the book or the DVD / Blu-ray, why not do so today? Each is an essential addition to your Louise Brooks collection. And what's more, my book is available around the world on Amazon.