In the U.S., Pandora’s Box closed not long after it opened. By then, sound had come in and poorly reviewed silent films from abroad were little in demand.Although exhibition records of the time are incomplete, it seems the film was seldom shown in America in the years following its New York debut. One rare and telling screening took place in Newark, New Jersey, at the Little Theater, a second-run house not above showing sensational or exploitive fare.

The film, then synchronized with “thrilling” sound effects and English titles, was described as “The German sensation that actually reveals most of the evils of the world” while offering “Raw reality! A bitter exposé of things you know but never discuss.” Newspaper ads for this 1931 screening warned “Adults Only.”

From there, the film fell further into obscurity. In 1943, Iris Barry, who started the Museum of Modern Art’s film department, met with Brooks, who was then living in near poverty in New York City. Barry’s opinion carried considerable weight (and did so for decades to come), and she told Brooks the museum would not acquire a copy of Pandora’s Box, as “it had no lasting value.”

Essay by Thomas Gladysz (8)
 
Things began to change in the mid-1950s. James Card, a passionate devotee of silent movies and the founder and first curator of the Department of Film at the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, New York, saw Pandora’s Box at the Cinémathèque Française, which then held one of the few known copies of the film. Card was bowled over.

He acquired a print from the Danish Film Museum, another holder, and returned home. Though the print was incomplete and in need of considerable work, Card showed Pandora’s Box along with Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (also with Brooks) to audiences slowly catching up with—as renowned German critic Lotte Eisner put it in the 1950s—Brooks’s “miraculous” performance.

Those screenings helped stir interest in the actress and her surviving films. Over the years, Card’s championing of Pandora’s Box was joined by other film historians, curators, and critics, including Henri Langlois, Kevin Brownlow, and Kenneth Tynan. Eventually, the film’s reputation, intertwined with Brooks’s, began to grow.

In his acclaimed 1989 biography of Brooks, Barry Paris put it this way: “A case can be made that Pandora’s Box was the last of the silent films—not literally, but aesthetically. On the threshold of its premature death, the medium in Pandora achieved near perfection in form and content.”