I have never been an admirer of Pabst. I find his films to be studies of depraved Germans and their feasting on the innocent. His men are weaklings, rapists, schemers, or all three. His women are either brothel madams or sadistic, repressed victimizers. Against these he plays an innocent ingénue, who eventually falls into the traps laid for her and either does or does not escape.
SPOILERS AHEAD: Diary Of A Lost Girl, one of two silent films he made with American personality Louise Brooks, and her last silent film, pits the naïve Brooks as a daughter of a pharmacist, who is a lecher, and who stands by and permits his assistant to deflower her. He then forces her into a reform dormitory, run by a sadistic pair Dickens would have gloried in, and gives her illegitimate baby up for adoption. At the reformatory, from which she eventually escapes, she falls in with other "lost" people, who become her friends.
The last half of the film becomes somewhat unbelievable in its sudden coincidences and turns for the better. She enters a brothel and is successful there until her father's death leaves her an heiress. From there it is a series of escapes from her "past," concluding with redemption for one of her "lost" compatriots.
Brooks is no actress. She never was. I have seen a number of her films and am amazed she became a star at all. She so resembled both Clara Bow (a far better actress) and Colleen Moore (a better romantic tragedian), I wonder she got a foothold in the door. Her face, no matter what happens to her, is blank and wistful. It is a beautiful face and at times she shows some facial expression, but it is rare. She does have "presence" on screen. I will grant her that. I kept wondering what the performance might have been like had Pabst retained and nurtured Garbo (she came to the US after filming The Joyless Street for Pabst) for the role.
Pabst use of other actors and actresses who range from plain to ugly does emphasize Brook's beauty and the casting may have been deliberate. The cinematography and editing are perfunctory. None of the sumptuousness of his later The Love of Jeanne Ney is present here. Two remarkably homely performers, Fritz Rasp as Meinert, the assistant who ruins her, and Valeska Gert, the sadistic matron of the reformatory, are creepily evil and repellent. He later used Rasp in Jeanne Ney and had used Gert earlier as the madam in Joyless Street.
Two scenes stand out visually: the mechanically synchronized reformatory eating scene (right out of Oliver Twist); the girls' tossing of the diary from bed to bed and eventually converging on the matron with fists.
The film is mildly interesting to modern audiences, primarily as an example of Brooks' work and of Pabst's subject matter, but ultimately fails in my opinion from our inability to empathize with the somnolent leading lady.
SPOILERS AHEAD: Diary Of A Lost Girl, one of two silent films he made with American personality Louise Brooks, and her last silent film, pits the naïve Brooks as a daughter of a pharmacist, who is a lecher, and who stands by and permits his assistant to deflower her. He then forces her into a reform dormitory, run by a sadistic pair Dickens would have gloried in, and gives her illegitimate baby up for adoption. At the reformatory, from which she eventually escapes, she falls in with other "lost" people, who become her friends.
The last half of the film becomes somewhat unbelievable in its sudden coincidences and turns for the better. She enters a brothel and is successful there until her father's death leaves her an heiress. From there it is a series of escapes from her "past," concluding with redemption for one of her "lost" compatriots.
Brooks is no actress. She never was. I have seen a number of her films and am amazed she became a star at all. She so resembled both Clara Bow (a far better actress) and Colleen Moore (a better romantic tragedian), I wonder she got a foothold in the door. Her face, no matter what happens to her, is blank and wistful. It is a beautiful face and at times she shows some facial expression, but it is rare. She does have "presence" on screen. I will grant her that. I kept wondering what the performance might have been like had Pabst retained and nurtured Garbo (she came to the US after filming The Joyless Street for Pabst) for the role.
Pabst use of other actors and actresses who range from plain to ugly does emphasize Brook's beauty and the casting may have been deliberate. The cinematography and editing are perfunctory. None of the sumptuousness of his later The Love of Jeanne Ney is present here. Two remarkably homely performers, Fritz Rasp as Meinert, the assistant who ruins her, and Valeska Gert, the sadistic matron of the reformatory, are creepily evil and repellent. He later used Rasp in Jeanne Ney and had used Gert earlier as the madam in Joyless Street.
Two scenes stand out visually: the mechanically synchronized reformatory eating scene (right out of Oliver Twist); the girls' tossing of the diary from bed to bed and eventually converging on the matron with fists.
The film is mildly interesting to modern audiences, primarily as an example of Brooks' work and of Pabst's subject matter, but ultimately fails in my opinion from our inability to empathize with the somnolent leading lady.