Director G.W. Pabst loved working with actress Louise Brooks and he loved putting her characters through Hell. In this one, life throws her around like a rag doll after she has an illegitimate child with her father’s work assistant. The guy’s a real creep though, so she won’t marry him and I guess back in Weimar-era Germany that meant giving up her baby to a midwife and going off to a reform school run by arch militaristic sadists. She eventually escapes and turns to prostitution to get by.
This is a few notches below Pabst’s first film with Louise Brooks, Pandora’s Box. Brooks is great here and the film is strikingly adult, but the sluggish pace and the loss of some material censored in the original release hurts it.
Based on the scandalous 1905 novel by Margarete Böhme. The book was purported to be the genuine diary of a woman whose life spiraled into prostitution and it sold a bazillion copies throughout Europe.