Louise Brooks is luminous in this rather trite tale of a young girl's ruination and regeneration. The plot line founders toward the end but, as a whole, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is notable for its arresting visuals and set-piece sequences. Unfortunately, we'll never see G.W. Pabst's original intent:
"THE DIARY OF A LOST GIRL was based on the moralistic novel by Margarete Bohme... But the censors did not miss the point. They butchered DIARY more brutally than PANDORA. In the ending Pabst intended, Thymiane was to become the proprietress of her own high-class brothel, rejecting respectability in favor of the wealth and power that a rotten bourgeoisie could respect. But the censors insisted that Thymiane embrace precisely the kind of sentimental reformism that Pabst disdained, twisting the film into conformity with German middle-class values. Pabst capitulated because he had to coexist with them and because he would live to fight another day for such subsequent (and better) films as ...THE THREEPENNY OPERA... DOALG was a kind of sacrificial lamb, as its scenarist, Rudolf Leonhardt, affirms: 'Pabst's accommodating nature had already made him prepared to make two different endings -for vice, even involuntary vice, must not go rewarded. Where the censors had not forbidden passages beforehand, entire filmed sequences were cut without mercy later on...'"
I love what there is of it (especially the brothel & reformatory scenes), but I was never in the majority:
"But it was death, rather than immortality, that awaited DOALG at the box office upon its release... The influential critic Hans G. Lustig gave it a single withering paragraph in 'Der Tempel'... No serious criticism of DOALG could take place until three decades later...Lost on most critics was the fact that Pabst's technique in DOALG was different from that of PANDORA. Lotte Eisner, virtually alone, recognized a new, semi-documentary restraint: 'Pabst now seeks neither Expressionistic chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress."
Highly recommended!
"THE DIARY OF A LOST GIRL was based on the moralistic novel by Margarete Bohme... But the censors did not miss the point. They butchered DIARY more brutally than PANDORA. In the ending Pabst intended, Thymiane was to become the proprietress of her own high-class brothel, rejecting respectability in favor of the wealth and power that a rotten bourgeoisie could respect. But the censors insisted that Thymiane embrace precisely the kind of sentimental reformism that Pabst disdained, twisting the film into conformity with German middle-class values. Pabst capitulated because he had to coexist with them and because he would live to fight another day for such subsequent (and better) films as ...THE THREEPENNY OPERA... DOALG was a kind of sacrificial lamb, as its scenarist, Rudolf Leonhardt, affirms: 'Pabst's accommodating nature had already made him prepared to make two different endings -for vice, even involuntary vice, must not go rewarded. Where the censors had not forbidden passages beforehand, entire filmed sequences were cut without mercy later on...'"
I love what there is of it (especially the brothel & reformatory scenes), but I was never in the majority:
"But it was death, rather than immortality, that awaited DOALG at the box office upon its release... The influential critic Hans G. Lustig gave it a single withering paragraph in 'Der Tempel'... No serious criticism of DOALG could take place until three decades later...Lost on most critics was the fact that Pabst's technique in DOALG was different from that of PANDORA. Lotte Eisner, virtually alone, recognized a new, semi-documentary restraint: 'Pabst now seeks neither Expressionistic chiaroscuro nor Impressionistic glitter; and he seems less intoxicated than he was by the beauty of his actress."
Highly recommended!