Frank Wedekind created Lulu, the central character in the plays behind the film Pandora’s Box. Wedekind developed her in Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, two German-language dramas first performed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The 1929 film Pandora’s Box, directed by G. W. Pabst, is not a direct filming of the Greek myth. It adapts Wedekind’s Lulu plays and follows Lulu through a melodramatic story of desire, scandal, social judgment, and violence. Louise Brooks played Lulu in the best-known screen version.
Wedekind’s Lulu is often discussed as a deliberately unsettling figure rather than a simple villain or heroine. Her relationships expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the society around her, which helped make the character important in modernist theatre and cinema.
The film title can cause confusion because “Pandora’s box” also names the Greek myth’s container. In Pabst’s movie, the phrase functions as the title of a Lulu adaptation, not as a literal retelling of Hesiod.