Louise Brooks Part II: Jerry Vermilye

Louise as Lucienne in Prix de Beaute

Pabst wanted Louise to remain in Germany, learn the language and allow him to make her into a great actress. The fact that she preferred to belittle her career in favor of American social life infuriated him. As Louise later remembered, on the final shooting day of The Diary of a Lost Girl, he warned her: "Your life is exactly like Lulu's, and you will end the same way." Her uncomprehending reaction was merely a sullen glare.

At the end of July 1929, she returned to her beloved New York on the Olympia, only to be summoned back to Europe almost at once. Within the month, she was in Paris to star in the now fully-financed Prix de Beaute (Beauty Prize). But she wasn't prepared for her reception by the French, who embraced her as an important international movie star. Considered passe by now in Berlin, she became the rage of Paris, where her photos were seen everywhere, and beauty salons offered coiffures "a la Louise Brooks".

Rene Clair was no longer to direct Prix de Beaute, due to disagreements with SOFAR-Film officials over his script. Consequently, the film was assigned to Augusto Genina, then considered a top-notch director among the Italian expatratiates in France.

A working-class drama, the picture opens with beach goers enjoying the sun, sand, and water of a Sunday outing. Among them are the typist Lucienne and her linotype-operator boyfriend Andre (Georges Charlia), fellow employees at a Parisian newspaper. After she secretly enters her photo in a Miss France contest, Lucienne suffers regrets and tries to retrieve her picture-only to learn that she has won! Worried about Andre's anticipated disapproval, she's swept away to the Miss Europe competition in Berlin. There she faces an angry Andre, who arrives to take her home-or he vows never to see her again. She leaves the contest to return with him and they marry. Fan mail from her Miss Europe admirers follows her, upsetting Andre. And when the offer of a screen test arrives, she risks her marriage by sneaking away to meet the man who's arranged it, the wealthy Prince de Grabovsky (Jean Bradin). The movie's final sequence, set in the studio screening room where Lucienne and Grabovsky are reviewing her film, is memorable. As the jealous Andre sneaks in to look on, the screen character sings a number called "Ne sois pas jaloux, tais-toi-je n'ai qu'un amour, c'est toi" ("hush-don't be jealous-I've only one love, it's you"), and the Prince takes her hand. In the light from the projector, Andre pulls out a gun and shoots her. And, as her dead profile dominates the foreground, her celluloid image continues singing the haunting ballad in the background, with its sentimental echoes of Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland.