Louise Brooks
Also Known As: Mary Louise Brooks
Biography: Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the Jazz Age and flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career. Brooks began her career as a dancer. While dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City, she came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and was signed to a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in seventeen silent films and eight sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became a paid escort. For the next two decades, she struggled with alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78. [preceding biography, edited, from Wikipedia]
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Cherryvale, Kansas, USA
Adult: No
Birthday: November 14, 1906
Age: 118 years old
Gender: Female
Deathday: August 08, 1985
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Known For:
Pandora's Box
Overview: Lulu is a young woman so beautiful and alluring that few can resist her siren charms. The men drawn into her web include respectable newspaper publisher Dr. Ludwig Schön, his musical producer son Alwa, circus performer Rodrigo Quast, and seedy old Schigolch. When Lulu's charms inevitably lead to tragedy, the downward spiral encompasses them all.
Genres: Drama Crime Romance
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1929-01-30
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Diary of a Lost Girl
Overview: Thymian Henning, an innocent young girl, is raped by the clerk of her father's pharmacy. She becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family, and must fend for herself in a harsh, cruel world.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1929-09-27
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The Street of Forgotten Men
Overview: Easy-Money Charley, the best fake crippled beggar in New York, loses his beloved dog and adopts a dying prostitute's daughter to fill the empty place in his heart. But his fellow crooks and dissemblers mock him for sentimentality, and he disowns the child in order to bring her up secretly in the safety of a distant suburb. He brings her up as a young lady in ignorance of her true history or of his; but when he discovers that her affections have taken an unexpected slant, it brings about an end to their tranquil life, a crisis of conscience, and an opportunity for the sinister 'White-Eye' to take a hand...
Genres: Drama Crime
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1925-07-24
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The Canary Murder Case
Overview: A beautiful showgirl, name "the Canary" is a scheming nightclub singer. Blackmailing is her game and with that she ends up dead. But who killed "the Canary". All the suspects knew and were used by her and everyone had a motive to see her dead. The only witness to the crime has also been 'rubbed out'. Only one man, the keen, fascinating, debonair detective Philo Vance, would be able to figure out who is the killer.
Genres: Crime Mystery
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1929-02-16
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Miss Europe
Overview: Lucienne, typist and gorgeous bathing beauty, decides to enter the 'Miss Europe' pageant sponsored by the French newspaper she works for. She finds her jealous lover Andre violently disapproves of such events and tries to withdraw, but it's too late; she's even then being named Miss France. The night Andre planned to propose to her, she's being whisked off to the Miss Europe finals in Spain, where admirers swarm around her. Win or lose, what will the harvest be?
Genres: Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1930-08-01
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Rolled Stockings
Overview: Though billed second, the stunningly beautiful Louise Brooks is the focal point of the campus comedy Rolled Stockings. It's the old one about two collegiate brothers, Jim and Ralph Treadway (James Hall, Richard Arlen), in love with the same girl, Carol Fleming (Brooks).
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1927-06-18
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Beggars of Life
Overview: After killing her treacherous step-father, a girl tries to escape the country with a young vagabond. She dresses as a boy, they hop freight trains, quarrel with a group of hobos, and steal a car in their attempt to escape the police, and reach Canada.
Genres: Adventure Drama Crime
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1928-09-22
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The Show Off
Overview: A blowhard who poses as a railroad executive (but is really just a $30-a-week clerk) catches a young bride and then drives her family's finances to the brink of ruin.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1926-08-16
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A Girl in Every Port
Overview: Two sailors with a rivalry over chasing women become friends. But when one decides to finally settle down, will this mysterious young woman come between them?
Genres: Adventure Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1928-02-26
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It Pays to Advertise
Overview: To prove his thesis that any product--even one that doesn't exist--can be merchandized if it is advertised properly, a young man gets together with his father's savvy secretary to market a non-existent laundry soap. Complications ensue when his "product" turns out to be more successful than even he imagined--and now he has to deliver.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-02-18
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Love 'Em and Leave 'Em
Overview: Mame Walsh promised their mother on her deathbed to look after little sister Janie. But Janie helps herself to everything of her sister's, be it her clothes or her men - even the money entrusted to her by fellow employees at the store they work at. Regardless, Mame can't break her promise. So when it comes to getting Janie out of trouble, big sister comes to the rescue.
Genres: Comedy Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1926-03-19
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Overland Stage Raiders
Overview: After gold shipments from a mining town have been hijacked, the three Mesquiteers buy a plane to fly the gold out. The owner of the shipping line brings in Eastern gangsters to thwart them.
Genres: Western
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1938-09-20
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Windy Riley Goes Hollywood
Overview: A driver on a non-stop race from New York to San Francisco gets detoured to Hollywood, where he winds up working as a publicity man for a movie studio and assigned to revive the career of a beautiful but fading star.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-05-02
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It's the Old Army Game
Overview: Druggist Elmer Prettywillie is sleeping. A woman rings the night bell only to buy a two-cent stamp. Then garbage collectors waken him. Next it's firemen on a false alarm. And then a real fire.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1926-07-10
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Clara Bow: Discovering the It Girl
Overview: Clara Bow: Discovering the 'It' Girl features scenes from 25 of her films, as well as interviews with family members and acquaintances.
Genres: Documentary TV Movie
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1999-06-14
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God's Gift to Women
Overview: A notorious womanizer sets his sights on a pretty American tourist, only to be told by his doctor that he must give up all romance for his health.
Genres: Comedy Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-04-13
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Fragments: Surviving Pieces of Lost Films
Overview: Among the pieces featured in Fragments are the final reel of John Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) and a glimpse at Emil Jannings in The Way of All Flesh (1927), the only Oscar®-winning performance in a lost film. Fragments also features clips from such lost films as Cleopatra (1917), starring Theda Bara; The Miracle Man (1919), with Lon Chaney; He Comes Up Smiling (1918), starring Douglas Fairbanks; an early lost sound film, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), filmed in early Technicolor, and the only color footage of silent star Clara Bow, Red Hair (1928). The program is rounded out with interviews of film preservationists involved in identifying and restoring these films. Also featured is a new interview with Diana Serra Cary, best known as "Baby Peggy", one of the major American child stars of the silent era, who discusses one of the featured fragments, Darling of New York (1923).
Genres: Documentary TV Movie
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-04-03
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Empty Saddles
Overview: Buck runs into trouble when he buys a deserted cattle ranch that he turns into a dude ranch.
Genres: Western
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1936-12-20
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1001 Films
Overview: An ode to film preservation, it presents a night-time visit to a seemingly depopulated repository (presumably the Royal Film Archive of Belgium), juxtaposing a series of images of observation, reconstruction, and projection using film fragments - from the hand-painted, altered image frames of Georges Méliès' Kingdom of the Fairies to the iconic image of Louise Brooks - to turn the archive into a temporal wonderland of novel discoveries, hidden treasure, re-awakened curiosity, and critical re-assessment.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: nl
Release Date: 1989-01-01
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Now We're in the Air
Overview: Wally and Ray are cousins intent upon getting the fortune of their Scots grandad, an aviation nut. They become mixed-up with the U. S. flying corps and are wafted over the enemy lines in a runaway balloon. Through misunderstanding they are honored as heroes of the enemy forces, and sent back to the U.S. lines to spy. Here they are captured and almost shot, but everything ends happily. Only 20 minutes of this 6 reel comedy are extant.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1927-10-21
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The American Venus
Overview: A lost film - Mary Gray, whose father manufactures cold cream, is engaged to sappy Horace Niles, the son of Hugo Niles, the elder Gray's most competitive rival in the cosmetics business. Chip Armstrong, a hot-shot public relations man, quits the employ of Hugo Niles and goes to work for Gray, persuading Mary to enter the Miss America contest at Atlantic City, with the intention of using her to endorse her father's cold cream should she win. Mary breaks her engagement with Horace. When it appears that she will win the contest, Hugo lures her home on the pretext that her father is ill, and she misses the contest. Chip and Mary return to Atlantic City, discovering that the new Miss America has told the world that she owes all her success to Gray's cold cream. On this note, Chip and Mary decide to get married.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1926-01-31
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Louise Brooks
Overview: 55-Minute BBC Arena documentary on the film actress Louise Brooks
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1986-04-17
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A Social Celebrity
Overview: Small-town barber Max Haber is the pride of his father, Johann, who owns an antiquated barbershop. Max adores Kitty Laverne, the manicurist, who loves him but is ambitious to be a dancer, so she heads for New York, hoping that he will follow in pursuit of better things. Mrs. Jackson-Greer, a New York society matron, has occasion to note Max styling the hair of a town girl and induces him to come to New York and pose as a French count. There he meets April, Mrs. King's niece, and loses his heart to her, as well as to Kitty, now a showgirl.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1926-03-29
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Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture
Overview: The film tells the cultural story of Berlin during the Weimar Republic through interviews with a number of persons who were involved in literature, film, art, and music during the period. It includes interviews with Christopher Isherwood, Louise Brooks, Lotte Eisner, Elisabeth Bergner, Francis Lederer, Carl Zuckmayer, Gregor Piatigorsky, Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Kolisch, Mischa Spoliansky, Herbert Bayer, Mrs. Walter Gropius, and Arthur Koestler.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1976-10-07
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The City Gone Wild
Overview: Hard-boiled underworld melodrama, with gang wars and gunfights, in which criminal lawyer turns prosecutor to avenge a friend's death.
Genres: Crime Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1927-11-12
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Why Be Good?: Sexuality & Censorship in Early Cinema
Overview: Before the G, PG and R ratings system there was the Production Code, and before that there was, well, nothing. This eye-opening documentary examines the rampant sexuality of early Hollywood through movie clips and reminiscences by stars of the era. Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich and others relate tales of the artistic freedom that led to the draconian Production Code, which governed content from 1934 to 1968. Diane Lane narrates.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-05-23
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Just Another Blonde
Overview: Jimmy O'Connor and Scotty are a couple of New York City gamblers and sharpies who decide to go straight and, since they are such good friends, split 50-50 "even steven" on anything they get or do. Jimmy, a confirmed bachelor, doesn't care for women but Scotty falls in love with Diana O'Sullivan, a Coney Island girl. They decide that Jimmy needs a girlfriend and they opt for Jeannie Cavanaugh. But, following their 50-50 pact, Jimmy, although he has fallen in love with Jeannie, praises Scotty to her.
Genres: Romance Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1926-12-13
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Evening Clothes
Overview: Attracted by his wealth, avaricious Germaine marries D'Artois, then leaves him for a more sophisticated man. D'Artois retaliates by moving to the city and learning the proper social graces. His new life style proves to be too expensive for him, and at the end he is left with nothing but one suit of evening clothes and his now contrite wife.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1927-03-19
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Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu
Overview: Documentary recounting the life story of Louise Brooks in 5 sections: "Lulu in Toe Shoes"; "Lulu in Hollywood"; "Lulu in Berlin"; "Lulu in Hell"; and "Resurrection".
Genres: Documentary TV Movie
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1998-05-05
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Lulu in Berlin
Overview: Vérité documentarian Richard Leacock’s LULU IN BERLIN features one of the few long interviews ever done with actor Louise Brooks. It took place in her apartment in Rochester, New York, in 1971.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1984-05-27
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