Prix de beauté (1930)
Directed by Augusto Genina

Film Review

A case of art imitating life, the surprise ending of Prix de beauté has a cruel parallel with the fate of its lead actress, Louise Brooks.  Having burned her bridges in Hollywood, Brooks had entertained hopes of a glittering career in Europe, working with such distinguished filmmakers as G.W. Pabst.  Instead of fame and glory, Brooks merely put her name to a string of flops and soon ended up back in Tinseltown, earning a meagre crust as a supporting player in various nondescript films.  She quit acting in the mid-1930s and was soon forgotten.  Brooks was thrust back into the limelight in the 1950s when her first European film, Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) (1929), was resurrected and hailed as a masterpiece.  Somewhat belatedly, another acting legend was born.

Prix de beauté was to have been the second of Brooks' European films.  After falling out with her bosses at Paramount over demands for a pay rise and her refusal to dub one of her silent films (The Canary Murder Case), Brooks was eager to make another film with Pabst, the only film director she enjoyed working with.  Pabst had written a screenplay for a film with up-and-coming French filmmaker René Clair, who was committed to directing the film.  Not long after Brooks had signed the contract to star in Prix de beauté (effectively the death warrant to her career in Hollywood) Clair ran into insurmountable financial difficulties and had to abandon the project.  Tied to the contract, Brooks was unable to return to America and ended up making another film with Pabst, entitled Diary of a Lost Girl.  Like her previous film for Pabst, this proved to be another box office failure.

Enter Augusto Genina, an established Italian filmmaker looking for an exciting new project.  Genina liked Pabst and Clair's screenplay for Prix de beauté and secured financial backing to make the film.  Brooks found she had another lifeline - and it was to be her last.  Genina was an innovator and brought a variety of interesting styles to the film.  Prix de beauté begins almost as a documentary with a lively montage of ordinary people amusing themselves on their day of leisure - not unlike Curt Siodmak's Menschen am Sonntag (1930).  The cinéma vérité impression persists when the plot begins to emerge, and Genina skilfully avoids the pitfalls of contemporary melodrama by never letting us forget the ordinariness of his principal characters.  Brooks' oft-praised naturalistic style of acting (which was at the time derided as inexpressive) adds to the films realism and makes her character Lucienne so authentic that we cannot help but fall in love with her.  The sequence depicting the humdrum life Lucienne has chosen for herself is shot through with social realism - how easy it is for us to sympathise with her over her crushed hopes and feel the stifling smallness of the life that love has led her to.  From this point on, the tone of the film progressively darkens and it is in the manner of a German expressionistic thriller that Genina concludes his film, with a shocking yet beautifully ironic ending.

Prix de beauté was the perfect vehicle for Louise Brooks.  The actress has never looked more vital and natural as she does here.  Every close-up says as much as a dozen pages of dialogue, and it is with the utmost skill and subtlety that she reveals her character's inner feelings, the terrible conflict between ambition, duty and desire.  This should have been the film that made her a worldwide star but it came out at just the wrong time, when the talkies had consigned silent movies to history.  An unsynchronised soundtrack was hastily added to the film in the hope of improving its appeal (Brooks was dubbed by a French actress), but to no avail.  Some critics liked the film, but the public saw it as old hat.  This third flop in a row drove Brooks back to Hollywood and several years of ignominy in thankless supporting roles in lacklustre B-movies ensued.  How ironic that the three films that ended her dreams of stardom would ultimately make her one of the great icons of cinema, once they had been rediscovered and reappraised, years after her descent into obscurity.  As you watch Louise Brooks at the height of her powers in Prix de beauté you cannot help but ask yourself how such a beautiful and talented individual could let stardom slip through her grasp so easily.  But that, tragically, is part of the Brooks myth.

Film Synopsis

Lucienne, a typist for a Parisian newspaper, decides to a enter a beauty competition, despite her boyfriend André's fierce objections. Having won the title of Miss France, she sets off to attend a beauty contest in Spain where she ends up being crowned Miss Europe.  Lucienne attracts the attentions of Prince Adolphe de Grabovsky, but she rejects his advances and instead returns to Paris, keen to resume her modest life with André.  Prince Adolphe is not so easily dissuaded.  He finds where Lucienne lives and sends her a contract for a potentially lucrative film career.  Now bored with her uneventful life with André, Lucienne quietly slips away and makes a test film for her future employers.  Consumed with jealousy, André goes after Lucienne, intent on revenge...