Months after the notorious PANDORA'S BOX was released, Pabst and his American star Louise Brooks started their second and last film TAGEBUCH EINER VERLORENEN, based on a 1905 bestselling novel which had already been filmed.
The plot is pure melodrama but what keeps you watching is the vivid natural magnetism of Louise Brooks as Thymian.
On her Confirmation day Thymian's world crashes down: her housekeeper commits suicide after Thymian's pharmacist father rejects her and later that night Thymian is raped by her father's letcherous assistant, and has a baby.
Refusing to marry her rapist, Thymian's hypocritical family have the baby taken away and she is sent to a reformatory for fallen girls.
The girls are subjected to a regimented, joyless existance under the lesbian matron and her creepy assistant. She manages to escape with her friend Erika. After discovering her baby is dead, Thymian arrives at Erika's address... a brothel.
Shelf or charity shop? Put-upon Thymian can abide in my plastic DVD storage box. The film was ignored by critics and audiences, certainly not helped by the censors cutting it before the release. Despite Pabst suggesting she remain in Europe, Brooks, always strong-minded, returned to America but discovered Hollywood had, in essence, blacklisted for her troublesome reputation. By 1938 her career was over and she dwindled into depression, drink, and prostitution. French critics rediscovered her in the 1950s - Cinemateque Francaise co-founder Henri Langlois declared "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich: there is only Louise Brooks!" and by her death in 1985 she had become an icon. Pabst also cast vivid actors who deliver strong unlikeable characters: Fritz Rasp as the rapist, Sig Arno as an eccentric bearded brothel client, and it is sad to see the large Jewish actor Kurt Gerron as Dr Vitalis; he settled in Amsterdam in 1933 but was arrested by the Nazis and died in Auschwitz. Apart from Brooks, the most memorable performance is from Valeska Gert who Pabst directed several times: more famous as a modern dancer and experimental cabaret performer, she delivers an astonishing performance as the sadistic lesbian matron, pure theatrical grotequerie opposite Louise Brooks' modern stillness.
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