Box of delights | 31 May 2018

Two films this week, one that has stood the test of time, dazzlingly — it still feels as fresh as a daisy, almost 90 years on — and another that’s so tiresome it felt almost 90 years long.

First, Pandora’s Box, directed by G.W. Pabst in 1929, starring Louise Brooks and her iconic hair-do. It is always described as ‘a masterpiece of silent cinema’, which, let’s admit it, can strike fear into the heart of the average cinemagoer. It’ll be primitive, vaudevillian, barely watchable. There will be exaggerated hand-flapping and over-the-top faces. There will be a woman tied to the railway tracks and a moustached villain or, if it’s a comedy, then some poor bastard will surely get a plank in his face or will mistakenly wrestle his boss’s wife to the ground, ha ha. But with Pandora’s Box you forget that it’s black and white. You forget that the internet has yet to happen, or ready-made pastry.