Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Louise Brooks Looking for Lulu (1998)

This documentary, originally made for Turner Classic Movies and financed by Hugh Hefner, was directed by Hugh Munro Neely. Neely has made documentaries of other silent era actresses, including Mary Pickford, writer Frances Marion, actresses Olive Thomas, Clara Bow, Marion Davies and others. Written by Brooks biographer Barry Paris and narrated by Shirley MacLaine, the documentary includes interviews with actress Dana Delany, actor Roddy McDowall, archivist and historian Paolo Cherchi Usai, niece Roseanna Brooks (brother Theodore’s daughter), sister-in-law Margaret Brooks (Theodore’s wife), Denishawn dancer Jane Sherman Lehac, lyricist Adolph Green, composer David Diamond, friend Kaye MacRae, author John Springer, friend Bill Klein, and actor Francis Lederer.

Clips include a brief excerpt of an Indian dance by Ted Shawn and footage of Ruth St. Denis, plus clips from The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), the trailer for The American Venus (1926), It’s the Old Army Game (1926), The Show Off (1926), Love ’em and Leave ’em (1926), Beggars of Life (1928), The Canary Murder Case (1929), Pandora’s Box (1929), Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), her final Hollywood film Overland Stage Raiders (1938), and a 1976 filmed interview with Louise.

Born 14 November 1906, Louise Brooks grew up in Cherryvale, Kansas, and thereafter moved to Wichita, where she eventually saw a touring performance of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn’s artistic Denishawn dance troupe. At 15, Louise joined Denishawn in New York. At 17, she was fired by St. Denis. Barbara Bennett would help Louise find work as a dancer on Broadway, which eventually led to Hollywood.

The documentary covers the expanse of her career from Kansas, New York, Hollywood and Berlin, and the humiliating contraction from Europe to Hollywood to New York and back to Kansas. As rapidly successful as she was, she was nearly as quickly a failure. The Brooks art of living life was eventually somehow incompatible with the world’s everyday living of life. Paolo Cherchi Usai’s makes the observation that “getting close to Louise Brooks was like getting close to a tornado,” noting that her troubles were largely of her own making. Diamond describes her as “a lost soul.”

Neely touches in passing on Brooks’ failed marriage to director Eddie Sutherland, and her famous affairs with Charles Chaplin, producer Walter Wanger, William Paley, and others of wealth and power.

Louise eventually sought to escape from the bewildering circumstances of life via a gin bottle, a frustrating choice for so bright a woman. Eventually, like Lulu, she would again rely on men for her maintenance, as she did on broadcasting executive William Paley and ultimately on archivist James Card. At the end, Brooks considered herself a total failure. “. . . I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried with all my heart.”

— Carl Bennett