Diary of a Lost Girl

Director: G.W. Pabst
Stars: Louise Brooks, Ritz Rasp, Edith Meinhard
1929
This is a masterwork of the German silent cinema whose reputation has only increased over time. Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) traces the journey of a young woman from the pit of despair to the moment of personal awakening. Directed with virtouso flair by the great G.W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl represents the final pairing of the filmmaker with screen icon Louise Brooks, mere months after their first collaboration in the now-legendary Pandora's Box.

Brooks plays Thymian Henning, an unprepossessing young woman seduced by an unscrupulous and mercenary character employed by her father's pharmacy (played with gusto by Fritz Rasp, the degenerative villain of such Fritz Lang classics as Metropolis, Spione, and Frau im Mond). After Thymian gives birth to his child and rejects her family's expectations for marriage, the baby is stripped from her care, and Thymian enters a purgatorial reform school that seems less an institute of higher learning than a conduit for fulfilling the headmistress's sadistic sexual fantasies.

Diary of a Lost Girl is a moving German social drama, sadly not in the best of condition, but a must-have addition to any silent film collection. Certainly one of the highlights of 1920s cinema!!