DIARY OF A LOST GIRL Movie Review

Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen

The plot is part Dickens, part Jerry Springer; a wealthy pharmacist's daughter has a child by her father's assistant, then lands in a reform school commanded by a sadistic matron, moves on to a brothel, and ultimately becomes the wife of a wealthy count whose sexual secrets lead to his suicide. The last silent film by director Georg Wilhelm Pabst was based on a best-selling novel by Margaret Böhme, and was a perfect vehicle for the beautiful Kansas-born showgirl Louise Brooks to use as a follow-up to her enormously successful 1928 collaboration with Pabst, Pandora's Box. Diary of a Lost Girl ran into censorship troubles immediately, in practically every country where it was permitted to be shown at all. In the U.S. it was simply unavailable in anything resembling its complete form for many decades, until a restored and relatively full version was released in 1984. A director whose interest leaned toward the realities of street life, Pabst treaded into a bold new cinematic frankness with his 1925 The Joyless Street starring Greta Garbo, and took no prisoners with the legendary Louise Brooks's character Lulu in Pandora's Box. While not quite on that film's dramatically intoxicating level, Diary of a Lost Girl is nevertheless an enjoyably scandalous concoction.

NEXT STOP … The Joyless Street, Pandora's Box, The Threepenny Opera (1931)

1929 99m/B GE Louise Brooks, Fritz Rasp, Josef Rovensky, Sybille Schmitz; D: G.W. Pabst; W: Rudolf Leonhard; C: Sepp Allgeier, Fritz Arno Wagner; M: Timothy Brock. VHS, LV GPV, MRV, VDM