Diary of a Lost Girl (1930)

So much average

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"Diary of a lost girl" - the second film adaptation of the novel, supposedly based on a true story, the writer of the last century, Margaret Bome. Received by the press in 1905, is the most famous and best-selling book of women. By the end of the twentieth of its sales has exceeded more than a million copies, making the novel one of the top bestsellers of its time. One modern scholar has called "Diary of the Fallen" "Perhaps the most notorious and, of course, commercially the most successful autobiographical story of the early twentieth century.Literary sensation. According to the author tells the true story of a young woman forced into prostitution circumstances. At the time of publication, believed to be an authentic book is a diary, but argued only Bome that was its editor. Likewise there has been the emergence of the myth of some novel effects on social reform at the time.The first screening took place in 1918, director Richard Oswald «Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen». To date, the film is considered "lost" and no one in the audience has no opportunity to see it.The second film adaptation was the work of the so-called "historic duet" Georg Wilhelm Pabst filmmaker and an American actress Louise Brooks. According to rumors, he asked her did not even know, seeing only her picture with a charming and powerful features, a mysterious look. That same year she appeared before him in a few ambiguous psychological drama "Pandora's Box." Both films are emblematic of the German cinema of the late twenties and this despite the fact that the young Brooks at home in the states acted in film punchings, second-rate bands, however, after the Commonwealth with Pabst has signed a lucrative contract with film company «Paramount».Their duet was a success for both of them. Brooks joined the amazing image of her heroine, expressing regret and despair with a rare subtlety of nature, while Pabst reel filled with memorable, vibrant and accentuate the culmination of events moments, particularly a scene in a brothel, where circling in the dance of prostitutes and their clients share a daughter and a fallen selfish father in a sudden encounter. The story itself, as the film is filled with meaningful scenes. In the episode where the assistant girl's father clings to Meyner Thyme, after which the heroine of Louise Brooks, faints and he was a "dirty" smile carries her into his bedroom, symbolizes the suppression of pure kindness naive girl in front of vicious evil bastard lust. Georg Wilhelm Pabst film can also be partly compared with the early work of director Charles Chaplin. One of the scenes of the film in the penitentiary, which enters the main character, is very ironic and ambiguous context. Girls taking place in this institution re-education, and in fact every day tolerate violent attitude on the part of both the moral and ugly teachers, arrange one evening in a dormitory rebellion, lashing out at their supervisors throughout the crowd with his fists. Similar scenes are in movies of Chaplin, it is in his films where he played the director, when he kicked his foot heroes stupid and evil members of the order, thus showing their relationship to government authorities at the time as a whole, whose policies have complicated the lives of many people."Diary of the Fallen" - a psychological drama with realistic events, which is a blow to the selfish bourgeois society in the face of vicious character depicted in the film. The story of the preservation of resilience, kindness, courage, compassion, and love the girl, despite all the troubles through which she had to go through.

Saw this last night on a DVD I bought in Shenzhen, China. Enjoyed it thoroughly, though I don't know which 9 minutes of the film were cut at one point, and then restored in the print I watched.Clarifying the relationships: Meinert works for Herr Henning. Henning owns the pharmacy, and later on we learn that he actually inherited it from his late wife (you have to be able to read the summons to the reading of the will to know that; and that's why Thymian gets a share of it when he dies.) Meinert is essentially an apprentice of some sort, who is hoping to usurp the whole business for himself when Henning dies. That's why he seduces Thymian (perhaps has some idea of marrying the boss' daughter at the start of the film, his French postcards aside...), and then sucks up to Meta when she marries Henning.

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) *** (out of 4) Fairly raw German silent from director G.W. Pabst. A young woman (Louise Brooks) is raped and is eventually thrown out of her house when she has a baby. From here on the girl goes to a reform school, becomes a whore but will she find redemption? I was somewhat letdown by the film since I felt it did have a few flaws. I thought the men characters were really one sided and the second half of the film drags somewhat but there are certainly more positives than negatives. Brooks is terrific in the lead role and does a great job at showing off the virginal younger girl and the eventual sluttish, if mature, older woman. There's a scene where she's working and her father notices her. Within the same scene we see Brooks "slut" slide melt away into that virginal girl we saw at the end of the film in some of the best acting I've seen. The mood and atmosphere is very strong at the start of the film and the morality ending actually works quite nicely.

Twice in DIARY OF A LOST GIRL naive young Thymian (Louise Brooks) is raped after passing out - that is, stone cold unconscious for a lonnnngggg time - while being held in the arms of a man (first while conversing and second on the dance floor after drinking one glass of beer). This is too much! Was it perhaps considered normal in those days for sweet young things to faint dead away while in men's arms? I doubt it - even in D.W. Griffith films. Brooks, a stunner if there ever there was one, looks as if she could chew up these men and spit them out, which she sort of does by the finale. Fritz Rasp, as the first rapist, plays a character similar to his White Russian agent in Pabst's THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY (1927) - a man so repellent that no decent person would want to spend one minute in his presence. German cabaret artist Valeska Gert is memorable as the sadistic headmistress of the kind of reform school we would expect to encounter in "Our Gang" comedies, Oliver Twist dramatizations or Max Fleischer cartoons (the children are forced to lift spoonfuls of gruel to their mouths in time to a beating drum). The camera devours Gert's bald, brutish husband (Andrews Engelmann) at length as he curls his lips into a sickly smile, to make absolutely sure we see what an evil reptile he is. For a film about a "diary," one wishes that the screen time devoted to the heroine's actually writing in it were one tenth as long as villains' closeups.