The 1929 film Pandora’s Box, with Louise Brooks as Lulu, adapts plays by the German writer Frank Wedekind.
The screenplay draws primarily on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Both works feature Lulu, a charismatic and socially disruptive figure whose relationships and choices lead to increasingly severe consequences.
Wedekind wrote the plays around the turn of the twentieth century. Their frank treatment of sexuality, class, and conventional morality made them controversial, while also establishing Lulu as one of modern German drama’s most memorable characters.
G. W. Pabst’s film changes and condenses the stage material rather than reproducing it scene by scene. The ancient myth of Pandora is therefore a literary reference point, not the film’s plot: the movie follows Lulu and the world around her. This distinction helps separate the 1929 film from later mythological adaptations.