Pandora’s Box, the 1929 film starring Louise Brooks, draws chiefly on plays by Frank Wedekind.
Wedekind created the character Lulu in the plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The two dramas follow Lulu’s relationships, social ascent, scandal, and violent downfall. G. W. Pabst’s film is not a literal filming of every stage scene; it reshapes the material for silent cinema while retaining Lulu as its central figure.
Frank Wedekind was a German playwright whose work often challenged bourgeois morality and conventional sexual ethics. His Lulu plays became especially influential because they gave later artists a complex, controversial female protagonist rather than a simple moral example.
The title can cause confusion because Wedekind wrote a play called Pandora’s Box, while the film also uses that title. The mythological reference is therefore filtered through modern European drama, not presented as a direct adaptation of Hesiod’s ancient story.