BOOTLEG FILES 869: “Lulu” (1962 German drama starring Nadja Tiller and Hildegard Knef).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On a public domain label that probably didn’t have the rights to the film.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the proverbial cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely.
Remaking classic films is almost always a surefire mistake, since cinematic lightning rarely strikes twice. But it is easy to understand the temptation of going that route. After all, audiences don’t have to be cajoled into considering an unknown quantity with a remake, and the new versions usually take advantage of presentation opportunities not present in the original production – think of silent films remade in the sound era, black-and-white works reimagined in widescreen color, racy offerings that could unveiled without censorship constraints, and old-school epics refashioned with cutting-edge special effects to make them even more epic in scope.
Nonetheless, the yesteryear classics made without the various benefits enjoyed by a later generation of filmmakers constantly triumph – and, often, because they lack the benefits that the artists behind the remakes viewed as a deficit. After all, silent films are not inferior to sound films, black-and-white cinematography is not inferior to the color processes, and creative artists had no problems working around the rigidity of censorship through subtle coded language and situations laced through their intelligent screenplays.
A dramatic example of a remake that badly missed its mark was “Lulu,” the 1962 feature from German filmmaker Rolf Thiele that sought to revisit G.W. Pabst’s 1929 masterwork “Pandora’s Box.” In concept, it wasn’t a bad idea – Pabst was heavily criticized for taking liberties with the source material, Frank Wedekind’s scandalous plays “Earth Spirit” (1895) and “Pandora’s Box” (1904), and for casting American actress Louise Brooks as the German siren whose immorality destroys lives before she is killed by no less a figure than Jack the Ripper. Pabst’s film was heavily censored in nearly every nation where it was originally released, with some markets demanding the inclusion of a ridiculously upbeat denouement that bore no resemblance to the grim eroticism that came before it.
By the time Thiele came to the material, European film censorship relating to sexual subject matter was mostly a thing of the past as filmmakers including Roger Vadim and Federico Fellini brought a new era of frank maturity to the cinema. In the early 1960s, Wedekind’s Lulu was not going to generate the shock experienced when Pabst got behind the camera. And with the popular Austrian actress Najda Tiller as Lulu, German critics were not going to repeat the complaints they directed at having an American interloper in this difficult role.
The resulting “Lulu,” however, turned into a textbook example of how not to remake a classic. Much of the problem belongs to Tiller, a pretty woman in obvious blonde wigs who would not be out of place in a magazine advertisement for perfume or hairspray but who never embodied the carnal magnetism that drives men (and one lesbian countess) into fury. Tiller’s Lulu is a forerunner of the inane character played by Mae West in “Sextette” – the extraordinarily unlikely sexpot who unleashes over-the-top animalistic passions in everyone around her. But whereas West was playing her character for laughs (intentional and otherwise), Tiller plays it straight, and her significant lack of smoldering sensuality creates bizarre situations when otherwise respectable men start acting like Tex Avery’s zoot suited wolves in her dull presence.
It doesn’t help with the film getting off to a strange start by a title card explaining viewers will be viewing a “burlesque tragedy” while an interlocutor (played by Charles Regnier) opens the story before a fairground audience. Regnier’s character turns up throughout the story, offering droll sight gags to announce the arrival and departure of Lulu’s various conquests while occupying the Jack the Ripper role who puts the dangerous Lulu out of her misery.
Further complicating matters are the other actors, who seem to be compensating for Tiller’s lack of performance by excessive emoting in a manner that pre-dates Pabst back to the primitive days of nickelodeon movies. Some of the hamming is fun, particularly bug-eyed and rotund Leon Askin as Lulu’s first husband, a physician driven to fatal cardiac arrest by his naughty wife, and Sieghard Rupp as the bohemian artist who allows Lulu to destroy his studio before stealing his heart, reducing him to panting fury. Hildegard Knef is the baroness who pines for Lulu with Eeyore-level sadness, with her unrequited lust rewarded with a half-kiss by the indifferent object of her misplaced affections.
Filmmaker Thiele’s screenplay creates more of a hack-cut job in telescoping the Wedekind source material than the censors of Pabst’s day, while adding new touches including an icky prologue of Lulu’s mentor taking her in as a 14-year-old orphan (this segment is shot in a gauzy soft focus with an unseen body double who is clearly not Tiller). A few cheesy music hall numbers are thrown in that confirm the burlesque aspects of the film’s “burlesque tragedy,” including one where Lulu and other starlets dress as leopards in a circus setting overseen by a virile tamer with a whip.
Even worse, the film was shot in a cheaply quotidian black-and-white rather than a garish color palette that would have enhanced the sleazier aspects of the story.
“Lulu” had no problems getting released across Europe, albeit with some new titles, most notably in via a British distributor who changed the title to “No Orchids for Lulu,” a strange riff on the 1951 “No Orchids for Miss Blanchard.” There was no American theatrical release for the film, even though Thiele and Tiller were familiar on the far side of the Atlantic for their 1958 collaboration “Rosemary.” The public domain label Video Dimensions briefly had the film among its titles, even though the film is not in the public domain. An unauthorized print of the film is on YouTube, but without English subtitles – and the site’s automatic subtitle translator does a sketchy job in deciphering the German language, adding to an already bewildering experience.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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