'There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!'

Or so curator Henri Langlois said when asked why he had chosen to prominently display a huge portrait of Louise Brooks rather than Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich at the entrance of the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris on the occasion of its retrospective of the first sixty years of motion pictures.

Langlois was overselling his case-after all, I wouldn't want to imagine a movie history without Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich-but I wouldn't want to imagine one without Brooks either. She made just twenty-three movies, but while other actresses were more celebrated during the silent era, none were better, and when Langlois reintroduced her to a world that had forgotten her after a twenty-five year exile, perhaps he was entitled to a bit of hyperbole.

Brooks's brief but unforgettable film career followed the trajectory of an early NASA rocket-straight up, then straight down, with some crazy loops in the middle and a spectacular explosion at the end. She combined brains, elegant beauty and a scorching sex appeal with a party-girl work ethic self-destructive enough to end ten careers. She made no apologies for preferring jazz and alcohol to a steady job, and she burned every bridge she ever crossed, some while she was still standing on them, until finally there were no bridges left to burn.

'I have a gift for enraging people,' she once said, 'but if I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife.'

Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906 to an indulgent lawyer father and a social-crusading mother with the maternal instincts of an 'alligator,' Brooks became a dancer at an early age and as a teenager joined the Denishawn Dancers (working with the legendary Martha Graham). Later she danced with the George White Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies. 'I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance,' Brooks said, 'and I learned how to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.'

She made her movie debut in 1925 for Paramount Pictures, appearing in eleven films over a three year period, playing the quintessential flapper across from such actors as Adolphe Menjou and W.C. Fields. She had an insatiable appetite for the Hollywood nightlife, was a regular at William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle, and was a fixture in gossip columns. Her 'black helmet hairdo' was one of the ten most influential haircuts in history, according to InStyle magazine, and she was one of the most photographed celebrities of her time.

But it wasn't until 1928, when she made Howard Hawks's A Girl In Every Port and William A. Wellman's Beggars of Life, that she really made an impression as an actress.

Her contemporaries, schooled in the art of silent film overacting, thought she was doing nothing on screen; years later, it's clear she was a method actress before the method had been invented. 'The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body,' she said, 'but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.' As with the works of Buster Keaton, Brooks's understated, internal approach gives her performances a modern feel, very much in contrast to her contemporary, Greta Garbo, who wouldn't completely shed her silent film theatrics until 1933. Brooks never had any to lose.

(Brooks and Richard Arlen in Beggars of Life, 1928)

With her work in A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life, Brooks came to the attention of German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a collaboration that would result in the best work of both their careers.

Pabst, an Austrian born in what is now the Czech Republic, was one of the leading directors in Germany's important and influential film industry. After making movies with Greta Garbo (The Joyless Street, her first outside of Sweden) and Brigitte Helm (who later played the lead in Metropolis), Pabst set his sights on a movie version of a pair of stage plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Der Büchse Die Pandora (Pandora's Box), two well-known works by German playwright Frank Wedekind.

In his two plays, Wedekind had set out to expose the secret lusts and private immoralities of Berlin's ruling class, with the action centering on the manipulations and cruelty of a prostitute named Lulu. Wedekind described Lulu as a 'monster,' but Pabst re-envisioned her as 'sweetly innocent' and unaware of the evil she inspired, shifting the moral responsibility for the resulting tragedy to a flaw in her upper class patrons.

It was bold idea for a story well-fixed in the mind of a German public in no mood to acknowledge their role in the decadence and growing weakness of the Weimar Republic. '[M]y playing of the tragic Lulu with no sense of sin,' Brooks wrote later, 'remained generally unacceptable for a quarter of a century.'

In Brooks, Pabst saw the precise combination of innocence and unapologetic aggressiveness he was looking for in his Lulu. The problem was, she was under contract to Paramount Pictures and the studio had its own plans for the actress. Sitting in post-production was a silent movie, The Canary Murder Case-Brooks played the 'Canary' of the title, a blackmailing singer turned murder victim-which the studio wanted to re-shoot as a 'talkie.'

Typical of the industry as a whole, though, Paramount saw the advent of sound not just as a technical challenge, but also an excuse to slash salaries and dump difficult stars. Never a fan of the business side of acting to begin with, Brooks balked when the studio informed her she would be dubbing The Canary Murder Case for less pay. She quit on the spot, at which time studio head B.P. Schulberg informed her of Pabst's offer.

Legend has it that Marlene Dietrich was waiting in Pabst's outer office to test for Pandora's Box when a cable arrived saying that Brooks had left Paramount and was available to play Lulu. For Brooks, it was a fateful decision.

The first scene of Pandora's Box sets the tone. We first see Lulu in her spacious apartment in the city, friendly, smiling, fresh-faced-with a bottle of brandy tucked under her left elbow to pay off the meter reader with less than what she owes, and even though he's old enough to know better, he can't help thinking such a lovely, innocent smile is for him only. And it is, at least until the next man arrives.

Pabst had men pegged as nothing much more than big animals with pants on as many would open this particular Pandora's box without much regard to the cost to their dignity, social standing or bank accounts. Lulu is blessed with a sort of short-term moral amnesia that makes it possible to forget from moment to moment that her relationships with other people flow, or should flow, in two directions. As Brooks plays her, Lulu is a child in a woman's body, and that childlike innocence at the core of Brooks's approach is the key to the movie. Lulu is a flame who attracts men to their destruction, but because there's no malevolence in her, the audience never turns on her as they might a typically scheming femme fatale.

No doubt that's why Pabst so preferred Brooks to Dietrich. 'It's a part that can't be played by her type,' Brooks said later of Dietrich in a rare interview. Pabst agreed, saying, 'Dietrich was too old and too obvious-one sexy look and the picture would have become a burlesque.'

Premiering in Berlin in January 1929, Germans were outraged that Pabst had chosen an American to play their beloved Lulu and were offended that he had dared show Berlin's upper classes in a less than flattering light. The movie fared no better when it reached the U.S. in December of that same year. Already a relic of the silent era, Pandora's Box sank without a ripple.

Undeterred, Pabst began work on a follow-up to Pandora's Box in June, 1929. Diary Of A Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) is an adaptation of Margarete Böhme's novel about a girl who is seduced and raped only to be sent to a brutal reform school by a hypocritical father.

Arguably, the performance is the best of her career, at the very least, proving that Pandora's Box was no fluke.

As an innocent victim made to suffer outrageously at the hands of others, Brooks's character in this one, Thymian, is very nearly a polar opposite of Lulu. Yet in both movies, Brooks serves as a prism refracting upper class hypocrisy into its full spectrum of hidden sin. Discovering her father has seduced and impregnated the family housekeeper, a woman not much older than herself, Thymian turns to her father's lecherous business partner for solace, an unscrupulous lech who takes full advantage of the opportunity.

The subsequent rape, implied but not shown, leaves Thymian pregnant which, in the eyes of the hypocrites who raised her, is her own fault, a sin worthy of harsh punishment.

Filming those scenes must have been an uncomfortable reminder of a pivotal incident from Brooks's own childhood when as a nine year old she was molested by a neighbor--only to have her mother blame her for seducing the man when she came home crying. Brooks wrote later that the episode haunted her for the rest of her life and shaped her feelings about love.

After Thymian gives birth, her baby is given over to a midwife and Thymian herself is sent to a girl's reformatory that seethes with authoritarian cruelty. That Thymian's life improves when she escapes the reform school to work in a brothel should tell you everything you need to know about Pabst's opinion of reform schools, and I think Pabst, like fellow German directors Fritz Lang (M) and Leontine Sagan (Mädchen In Uniform), was groping to diagnose the very real sickness in German society that would soon bring Adolf Hitler to power.

Although heavily censored in its initial release, Diary of a Lost Girl was enough of a success in Europe that Brooks made a third movie, Prix de Beauté, a truly European effort with a screenplay from Pabst and French director René Clair, and direction by Italian Augusto Genina.

The film was a hit, yet despite Pabst's promise to turn her into an international star to rival Garbo, Brooks was bored with Europe and after three movies there, returned to an indifferent America. The hard work of making films in a language not her own held no interest for her, no matter how much fame or fortune was in the offing.

'Your life is exactly like Lulu's,' Pabst angrily told her on parting, 'and you will end the same way.' He wasn't far wrong.

Still, in 1931, William Wellman, who had directed Brooks in Beggars of Life, offered her the female lead in his next picture, James Cagney's gangster classic, The Public Enemy. Brooks initially said yes, then changed her mind and abruptly left Hollywood to be with then-lover George Preston Marshall. The role went instead to Jean Harlow and made her an instant star.

Brooks had burned her last bridge. There was nowhere to go but down.

(Candid shot of Louise Brooks)

'That Hollywood treatment is murder, just murder,' she said later. 'It isn't that people turn their heads not to speak to you, they don't see you, you're not a person anymore. The people who've dined with you and you've spent weekends with, they look right at you, you don't exist.'

By the time she realized she missed acting, it was too late. 'I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it,' she said later, composing her own epitaph, 'nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away.'

Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1936 and appeared in a pair of Westerns, including her last film, Overland Stage Raiders (1938) with John Wayne, then spent another two years in Hollywood waiting for offers that never came. When she left California in 1940, she left for good. She was thirty-four.

She said later that only a monthly stipend from CBS founder William Paley kept her from suicide. 'How I have existed fills me with horror,' she wrote, 'for I have failed in everything-spelling, arithmetic, riding, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual excuse of not trying. I tried with all my heart.'

Then by chance in 1953, Brooks's neighbor had a conversation with James Card, curator of the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, N.Y., who mentioned that he had been searching for years to find Brooks. The neighbor introduced the two, and Brooks and Card began a correspondence that led Brooks to relocate to Rochester and begin writing a series of respected essays about the silent era, collected under the title Lulu in Hollywood. In 1957, Henri Langlois held his film retrospective in Paris and reintroduced Brooks to a world finally ready to recognize her talent.

More than a quarter of a century after she had turned her back on fame, fame forgave her. She is now regarded as one of the greatest actresses of the silent era.

Brooks lived out the rest of her life in Rochester, writing, painting, reading voraciously, entertaining friends, occasionally lecturing to students at the Eastman House, but otherwise avoiding the public that had rediscovered her. In later years, she suffered from arthritis and emphysema, living like a character from the Proust she loved in memories of things past.

'In my dreams,' she said not long before her death, 'I am not crippled. In my dreams, I dance.'

Stuffed with fluff with buttons for eyes, the Mythical Monkey writes about classic movies as often as a blog-typing sock monkey can. Check out his website, A Mythical Monkey Writes About the Movies.