Pandora’s Box is a German film from the silent era, and is one that I actually hadn’t heard of myself until recently. Still, it’s been on a lot of “best movies of all time” lists, and I like to try to see the classics whenever I have a chance. I also found out that famous director Quentin Tarantino considers it among his 10 favorite movies of all time, which I thought was interesting.
For what it’s worth, I think the movie has an interesting premise. The movie’s title is an obvious reference to Greek mythology, where a woman named Pandora opens a box that unleashes all of the evils upon the world. This movie has nothing to do with the actual story of Pandora’s box, but it’s thematically relevant. It centers on a character named Lulu, who is a very sexual person, to say the least. Lulu drives the men around her wild, and so the beginning of the movie looks a lot at how she affects the men in her life. But after a while, we start to see the consequences of Lulu’s promiscuity, as it begins to drive some of the men to violent acts.
Unfortunately, Pandora’s Box is a movie that hasn’t aged well in my opinion. I willingly go back to watch silent films sometimes just because I want to experience the classics. So I have a passion for this sort of thing, and even I get bored with movies like this. While I don’t really struggle with black-and-white movies, I do have a hard time watching certain silent films. I don’t mind it when it’s something like a Charlie Chaplin movie, because those rely on visual gags to be entertaining. So, nothing is really lost through the absence of sound. But with a movie like Pandora’s Box, it just would have benefited from being a sound movie, and I personally would have enjoyed a retelling of this movie after the silent era. There’s some interesting elements here, but it’s hard to get through.
The other big thing that took me out of Pandora’s Box was its length. The movie is over 2 hours in length, which is really long for a movie of this era. I feel like I need to preface this by saying that a movie being long isn’t automatically a mark against it for me. I consider movies like Gone with the Wind and Seven Samurai to be masterpieces, and they’re over 3 hours long. But for me, Pandora’s Box could have been a much better movie if it was a tighter experience. The movie just really started to lose steam for me after the halfway point, and I found myself constantly checking how much time was left because I was ready for it to be over long before it was. The movie has interesting moments, but it’s bogged down by a lot of really long scenes.
All in all, I just didn’t like Pandora’s Box as much as I was hoping to. I don’t consider it a bad movie per se, as there were a lot of moments that sucked me in. But it’s just one of those movies that I ended up feeling really lukewarm towards. I’m not upset that I watched it, but I’m also probably not ever going to watch it again. As far as a recommendation goes, I’m going to say that if this is a movie that was hard for me to get through, I can’t imagine it being something that most audiences will enjoy. If you are interested, it is currently available for streaming through HBO Max at the time of this writing, but I can’t imagine that anyone outside of the most diehard of film historians is going to be into this.
2.5/5
