dlee2012 Prix de Beauté is an interesting late Louise Brooks vehicle. Initially much lighter in tone than Pandora's Box or Diary of a Lost Girl, there is a sudden twist in the narrative at the end which changes the way in which one looks at the entire film.Brooks here is at her best, though she is playing a somewhat more sympathetic character than those she portrayed in her two best known films. Amusingly, her character, Lucienne, is referred to as Lulu in the opening minutes of the film, recalling her previous year's success. Although her voice is overdubbed in French, Brooks carries the role convincingly with her masterful use of facial expressions, learned during her years making silents.The opening scenes show her fiancé, Andre, bullying a work colleague yet this is depicted in a slapstick manner, leading one to think the film will be a comedy.Andre is depicted from the outset as a largely unsympathetic character due to his domineering nature but there is a slight nuance to the performance and one feels increasing sympathy as it is shown that Brooks' character is more interested in the glamour of her new career than remaining loyal to him and her fickleness in love allows one to understand the turn events take at the end.One interesting technique used throughout the film is to contrast scenes of the organic (Brooks and the other pageant contestants) with extreme close-ups of the mechanical (such as the printing press, the piano and various clocks.) The scene of the bird trapped in the cage may be a cliché now but it works effectively in this film as a symbol of Lucienne's feelings of being trapped in a drab life by Andre.Sound is not used in a particularly innovative way in this film but the score is delightful and suits the atmosphere of the story. In particular, the early jazz music and bal-musette piece during the ballroom scene are lovely.The film is well paced and tension builds quickly, though not abruptly, as the mood changes towards the end. The lighting becomes almost noir-like and the scenes of Lucienne dying whilst her image lives on, happily, on the screen, are a wonderfully ironic touch.Overall, this film will be of most interest to fans of Brooks and connoisseurs of early French cinema. It falls short of being a masterpiece but it is well-executed and intriguing, making it a solid work that can be enjoyed by all.

Igenlode Wordsmith We saw the silent version of this film, and it is quite simply shimmeringly beautiful. It's quite hard to see how a sound version could have been created, since it is shot with pure silent technique, long wordless sweeps of narrative without a single intertitle -- save for a few disconcerting sequences where Louise Brooks, playing a French typist, is quite visibly speaking in English... The only section that obviously cries out for sound is the final scene, where Brooks is watching the rushes for her test 'for a sound film': footage which plays constantly in the background as the action unfolds, with her mouth moving in ceaseless soundless song. I was unsurprised to learn afterwards that this passage alone in the talkie version had been hailed as an exemplar of new technique! In the sunny beauty of its opening scenes and the fairy-tale inevitability of what follows, the film resembles a dream. As a 'Louise Brooks movie' it was not at all what I was expecting, either from her Hollywood comedies or from G.W.Pabst's German melodramas: I found the idiom more fluent and enjoyable than either, and Brooks herself is a different creature, a sturdy laughing young animal rather than a shop-window vamp or manipulated doll.But what gives this film greater depth than at first appears is the unexpected second half; repelled by the rich parasites who cluster around her beauty, the pauper princess returns to a tear-stained reunion with her humbly-born true love... and the tale might very well have been ended there. Fairy-tale, however, turns to tragedy. The dilettante Grabovsky, confident in his ability to manipulate the woman he desires, is yet all too correct in his self-interested prediction -- the young lovers cannot make each other happy -- and André, ironically, was right to mistrust the social influence of beauty contests: after the intoxication of her moment's glory, Lucienne frets herself to despair over the humdrum routine of married life while her husband, in turn, is driven wild by any reminder of the whole affair. If it were a simple case of a mis-matched marriage, that would be one thing... but the true tragedy is that they do love each other.In many ways "Prix de Beauté" reminds me of Murnau's "Sunrise". But if so, the fairground and photographer scenes here would form a distorted mirror-image of the joyous reconciliation in "Sunrise"; no dream but an alienating nightmare. And the following dawn brings not a miraculous reunion but an empty bed and deserted home. Leaving a letter to say that she loves him and will always love him, Lucienne vanishes again from André's life in quest of brightness and freedom; and this time she will never come back.Gossip columns confirm all André's worst convictions, as he learns of his wife's whereabouts through reports coupling her name with Grabovsky. When the young workman penetrates at last to the lavish sanctum of the screening-room, it is with drawn gun -- to be greeted by the sight of his rival courting and caressing a laughing Lucienne, the same woman who had pledged her undying affection as she left him. He kills her, but even as he kills is transfixed by the living image on screen, Lucienne in all her transformed glory as he never saw her. The two women are juxtaposed in an endless, powerful moment, as André is seen, seized, unresisting, and pulled away: the dying girl and her singing self still projected above, caught unknowing out of time into celluloid eternity, playing on unconscious of life or death or love beneath her...The main jarring element in the film is the character of André's co-worker Antonin, who appears to serve no role throughout other than to be the licensed butt of his contemporaries' malice. He is the ugly one who can never get the girl, the ungainly wimp who is tripped and tormented in the washrooms and at work, and must take it all with an uncertain ingratiating smile in his fruitless hope for social acceptance: a typical product of the bullying of the more gifted and popular, in other words, but one the audience is apparently being invited to laugh at along with his tormentors. Unless the intention is to expose a darker side to the protagonists (for which I perceive no sign), the character seems to exist merely as comic relief, but comic relief with a distinctly nasty edge. When we know him only as an inept Peeping Tom at the waterside, it's easy to laugh, although the others' revenge seems a little over the top; when we discover that he is no chance-met stranger but André's colleague and regular sidekick, the continuing attacks rapidly cease to be very funny.But it is the images that remain. Beauty, nightmare, and dream.

laursene I just saw MoMA's restored print of the silent version of Prix de Beaute. FAR better than the sound version, which is badly post-synched, shorter, and poorly paced. Bravo to the crew of restorationists who've given us back this fine film! (Trivia: The contract that Lucienne receives from the movie studio says on its letterhead, "Films, silent and talking" - an indication of how some studios were still hedging their bets in 1929-30.)Brooks' performance is very much of a piece with her work in the Pabst films, but takes it in some interesting new directions - whereas Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl are about the demimonde, Prix de Beaute is about a humble young woman's introduction to the bright, shiny new world of the media, modern technology, and the fame machine that they created.The collaboration of Pabst and Rene Clair on the screenplay is every bit as intriguing as it sounds. The first half, centering on Lucienne and her friends at the newspaper (she's a typist, her beau a linotype operator), is the Clair part - showing a fascination with recording equipment, movies, and the way the media manufactures icons. There's a sense optimism and a tremendous vigor to the life of working Paris portrayed here.The second half is the Pabst part, where everything turns dark as Lucienne's fairy tale as a beauty queen ends and she faces life as a working class housewife. She makes her escape only to have that life catch up with her. The ending is unforgettable, forcing the viewer to consider the ways that illusion and reality become confused in modern life, sometimes tragically. Clear through, the film shows a fine sense of class distinctions - how modern life can break them down and the traps they still set. Aside from Pabst's and Clair's own films, Prix de Beaute calls to mind Dreiser's novels, particularly An American Dream and Sister Carrie. Sunset Boulevard is anticipated as well. Makes one regret all the more American studios' indifference to Brooks - there was so much she could have done with any number of classic American roles.Brooks' work here is easily as good as her performances in the Pabst films, and Mate's and Nee's cinematography renders her stunning to look at. What a supremely expressive face! Too bad that this would be her last great film - not a full-blown classic, but a real gem.

tprofumo Cult icon Louise Brooks was never better than she is in this early French talkie, which turned out to be her last staring role.While Brooks' two German films, "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl" are far better known in the US, "Prix" is clearly just as good a film, in my view much better than the butchered "Diary.""Prix" tells a simple story of a working class French girl who dreams of a better life and sets out to get it by entering a beauty pageant. Rising all the way to the position of "Miss Europe," she then gives it all up for the working class man she loves. But she finds that life as a housewife in a dreary walk up flat is killing her soul, as is her jealous husband, and eventually she walks out when she gets a chance at a film contract. But her husband won't let her go and the film builds to a tragic ending that is still considered one of the best climatic scenes in film history.This film features strong direction, extremely exciting location photography by famed cinematographer (and later director) Rudolph Mate and an intelligent,Spartan script by Rene Clair.But the wonder of the film is Brooks herself. Although her voice is dubbed by a French actress (Brooks didn't speak French) the film was initially planned as a silent and in large chunks of it, her character doesn't speak, anyway. But Brooks' fortune was her face and what she could do with it and there are few in film history who could do more. While there are some echos of silent film technique in her work, she was so far ahead of her time that most of her performance seems as fresh today as it did in 1929. Whether she is the unhappy girl being dragged by her boyfriend through a working class mob at a carnaval, or the depressed housewife staring into a canary's cage and feeling just as trapped, Brooks is a revelation.But it is when she is happy in this film that Brooks simply leaps off the screen at you. In most of the still photos she shot over the years, Brooks doesn't smile, apparently because she'd promised herself not to ever wear one of those pasted on grins found on showgirls on stage. But when called upon in a film to express happiness, no one ever exceeded Brooks, who may be the most magnetic actress in film history.While "Pandora's Box" will always be her signature film, "Prix de Beaute" ranks a close second in my mind as the best film work of her career.