
Acting
Louise Brooks
Born 1906-11-14 · Cherryvale, Kansas, USA
Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the Jazz Age and flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career. Brooks began her career as a dancer. While dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City, she came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became a paid escort. For the next two decades, she struggled with alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78. [preceding biography, edited, from Wikipedia]
Acting credits
7.3Thymian Henning, an innocent young girl, is raped by the clerk of her father's pharmacy. She becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family, and must fend for herself in a harsh, cruel world.
Diary of a Lost Girl
1929
7.4The rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her.
Pandora's Box
1929
4.3Before the G, PG and R ratings system there was the Production Code, and before that there was, well, nothing. This eye-opening documentary examines the rampant sexuality of early Hollywood through movie clips and reminiscences by stars of the era. Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich and others relate tales of the artistic freedom that led to the draconian Production Code, which governed content from 1934 to 1968. Diane Lane narrates.
Why Be Good?: Sexuality & Censorship in Early Cinema
2007
NRExplores the culture and characters of the Jazz Age through the decade's heroine, the flapper.
Flappers, Speakeasies, and the Birth of Modern Culture
2010
7.2A blowhard who poses as a railroad executive (but is really just a $30-a-week clerk) catches a young bride and then drives her family's finances to the brink of ruin.
The Show Off
1926
7.1After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada.
Beggars of Life
1928
8.0Though billed second, the stunningly beautiful Louise Brooks is the focal point of the campus comedy Rolled Stockings. It's the old one about two collegiate brothers, Jim and Ralph Treadway (James Hall, Richard Arlen), in love with the same girl, Carol Fleming (Brooks).
Rolled Stockings
1927
10.0Buck runs into trouble when he buys a deserted cattle ranch that he turns into a dude ranch.
Empty Saddles
1936
8.3An unprecedented anthology of never-before-told true stories by and about some of Hollywood's most interesting stars, legends, and wannabes, and takes readers inside Hollywood's inner sanctum to show how casting decisions are made, who makes them, and who has the final word.
The Casting Couch
1995
6.0Two sailors with a rivalry over chasing women become friends. But when one decides to finally settle down, will this mysterious young woman come between them?
A Girl in Every Port
1928
9.0Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).
Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films
2011
8.3Clara Bow: Discovering the 'It' Girl features scenes from 25 of her films, as well as interviews with family members and acquaintances.
Clara Bow: Discovering the "It" Girl
1999
NRIn this silent romantic comedy-drama, a reality-challenged title writer must navigate the perils and possibilities of two worlds: the one in his head, and the one in which he has a chance at real love.
Away with Words
2026
6.8An Australian opera singer hires a husband so she can work in the U.S. Moore sings "Minnie the Moocher" in one scene.
When You're in Love
1937
6.4Lucienne, typist and gorgeous bathing beauty, decides to enter the 'Miss Europe' pageant sponsored by the French newspaper she works for. She finds her jealous lover Andre violently disapproves of such events and tries to withdraw, but it's too late; she's even then being named Miss France. The night Andre planned to propose to her, she's being whisked off to the Miss Europe finals in Spain, where admirers swarm around her. Win or lose, what will the harvest be?
Miss Europe
1930
6.5Jimmy O'Connor and Scotty are a couple of New York City gamblers and sharpies who decide to go straight and, since they are such good friends, split 50-50 "even steven" on anything they get or do. Jimmy, a confirmed bachelor, doesn't care for women but Scotty falls in love with Diana O'Sullivan, a Coney Island girl. They decide that Jimmy needs a girlfriend and they opt for Jeannie Cavanaugh. But, following their 50-50 pact, Jimmy, although he has fallen in love with Jeannie, praises Scotty to her.
Just Another Blonde
1926
5.2After gold shipments from a mining town have been hijacked, the three Mesquiteers buy a plane to fly the gold out. The owner of the shipping line brings in Eastern gangsters to thwart them.
Overland Stage Raiders
1938
7.5A documentary looking at the life, films, and troubled times of America's first sex symbol, screen actress Clara Bow, featuring interviews and archive footage. It takes a look at why she is considered the 'Lost Screen Goddess'.
Clara Bow: Hollywood's Lost Screen Goddess
2012
An ode to film preservation, it presents a night-time visit to a seemingly depopulated repository (presumably the Royal Film Archive of Belgium), juxtaposing a series of images of observation, reconstruction, and projection using film fragments - from the hand-painted, altered image frames of Georges Méliès' Kingdom of the Fairies to the iconic image of Louise Brooks - to turn the archive into a temporal wonderland of novel discoveries, hidden treasure, re-awakened curiosity, and critical re-assessment.
1001 Films
1989
7.4Documentary recounting the life story of Louise Brooks in 5 sections: "Lulu in Toe Shoes"; "Lulu in Hollywood"; "Lulu in Berlin"; "Lulu in Hell"; and "Resurrection".
Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu
1998
8.0Small-town barber Max Haber is the pride of his father, Johann, who owns an antiquated barbershop. Max adores Kitty Laverne, the manicurist, who loves him but is ambitious to be a dancer, so she heads for New York, hoping that he will follow in pursuit of better things. Mrs. Jackson-Greer, a New York society matron, has occasion to note Max styling the hair of a town girl and induces him to come to New York and pose as a French count. There he meets April, Mrs. King's niece, and loses his heart to her, as well as to Kitty, now a showgirl.
A Social Celebrity
1926
5.7A beautiful showgirl, name "the Canary" is a scheming nightclub singer. Blackmailing is her game and with that she ends up dead. But who killed "the Canary". All the suspects knew and were used by her and everyone had a motive to see her dead. The only witness to the crime has also been 'rubbed out'. Only one man, the keen, fascinating, debonair detective Philo Vance, would be able to figure out who is the killer.
The Canary Murder Case
1929
4.8A notorious womanizer sets his sights on a pretty American tourist, only to be told by his doctor that he must give up all romance for his health.
God's Gift to Women
1931
NRThe film tells the cultural story of Berlin during the Weimar Republic through interviews with a number of persons who were involved in literature, film, art, and music during the period. It includes interviews with Christopher Isherwood, Louise Brooks, Lotte Eisner, Elisabeth Bergner, Francis Lederer, Carl Zuckmayer, Gregor Piatigorsky, Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Kolisch, Mischa Spoliansky, Herbert Bayer, Mrs. Walter Gropius, and Arthur Koestler.
Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture
1976