Pandora's Box

In this silent film classic from the Weimar Republic, based on Frank Wedekind's plays ‘Earth Spirit’ and ‘Pandora's Box’, G. W. Pabst dissects bourgeois moral values. 
Dr Schön, newspaper owner, editor-in-chief and patriarch, intends to establish his respectable facade by arranging his bourgeois marriage, while at the same time furnishing a luxurious apartment for his mistress Lulu, who comes from the lowest social milieu. But the interior minister, whose daughter has been chosen by Schön for marriage, does not want to marry his child to a man who is sexually dependent on a prostitute, and Lulu, the seductive child-woman, also resists. At the premiere of the new variety show, she refuses to perform as long as her rival, the minister's daughter, is in the audience. She blackmails Dr Schön so successfully that he has to give up his bourgeois marriage plans and marry Lulu. The wedding celebrations bring the reluctant groom the certainty that Lulu has already had sexual relations with most of the wedding guests, including his own son.
Directed by G. W. Pabst, 1929