Expected more

Disturbing yet enthralling

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

A wonderful surprise! I've always heard that Louise Brooks' follow-up to her two star-making hits with G.W. Pabst was a pleasant but inconsequential swan song. I thought it was very good, with an absolutely brilliant performance by Brooks. Co-written by Pabst and Rene Clair, this is basically a silent movie with overdubbed sound. Thus, the director is able to avoid the stodginess that comes with early sound filmmaking. He uses a very intimate, fluid style with the camera drifting through crowds to discover the beautiful Ms. Brooks' face. The one big problem the film has is that Brooks' love interest (Georges Charlia) is so totally unworthy of Brooks from the start that you can never come close to sympathizing with him. But that's not that important, really. Brooks plays Charlia's fiancée. He forbids her from entering the Miss France contest, but she's already done so. When she wins the opportunity to compete for Miss Europe, she chooses to disobey him. When she wins the competition, the fame and male attention drives her back to Charlia. But poor, married life soon seems much worse to her. The film is extremely worthwhile just for the expressions of Brooks' face alone. Though she has words, as dubbed in by a French actress, she doesn't need them. Her smiles seem created by a filmmaking Leonardo, and her pains are ours. Lulu could never have survived in the talkies (and I've seen the proof, a short film she made with Roscoe Arbuckle shortly after this one), and perhaps the loss of Brooks is the greatest of the talking picture era.

Beauty prizes became a staple of many a municipality in the decade following the end of the Great War - perhaps they filled a gap left by many of the old throne and altar ceremonies of the ancien regime states that fell in 1918. In fact this beauty prize was set somewhere in northern Spain in 1930, when the Bourbons' were still in charge (just). We get a few brief glimpses of the girls on display, but I am at a loss to know what all the fuss was about.Opinion seems to be divided as to the merits of this film. That might be because different viewers have been seeing different versions. The one I saw (at London's National Film Theatre) was the silent version, but someone (I think the pianist, Stephen Horne) had interpolated a sound recording at the very end. It was a scratchy, haunting Edith Piaf. By this time Mr Horne had stopped playing. Lucienne Garnier (Louise Brooks) had stopped breathing, and the audience was left with no sound but that of Piaf as, on the screen, the occupants of a private cinema rushed about the body of Brooks beneath the movement of her recorded screen test. I don't know whether I have explained this well enough, but for me it was the best ending that I had seen (of a silent film) since I watched Anthony Asquith's "Shooting Stars" several years ago.The screenplay, by director Augusto Genina (and colleagues) seldom rises above the level of a soap opera, but this is beside the point. Having 'sold' Brooks to German audiences, G. W. Pabst (in league with Rene Clair) wished to do the same to the French. As 1930 was the end of the road for silent cinema - and as Brooks was no linguist - Pabst and Clair had a very narrow window in which to make a profit on Brooks. It didn't really work - French audiences were not quite moved, and Brooks was forced back to America where her reputation as a team player was, to put it mildly, low.Genina has produced a fine, naturalistic picture, on a subject well suited to his cosmopolitanism. The men in it (Georges Charlia as her dull and possessive fiancée, Andre; Yves Glad as a predatory, blacked up maharajah; Bandini as a randy White Russian playboy-prince) are almost incidental. They are simply walk-on characters that are required to give the film some momentum. For this is almost entirely about Brooks. Henri Langlois aptly likened the film to a lighthouse that only illuminates the audience when Brooks appears on screen, and then relapses into darkness. There are also some interesting shots of Parisians going about their business.Brooks was seldom sober enough to appreciate how effective she was in this film. Her deportment betrays no awareness that this was her evening. Her cinematic career after 1930 was to be tragic.

Cult icon Louise Brooks was never better than she is in this early French talkie, which turned out to be her last staring role.While Brooks' two German films, "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl" are far better known in the US, "Prix" is clearly just as good a film, in my view much better than the butchered "Diary.""Prix" tells a simple story of a working class French girl who dreams of a better life and sets out to get it by entering a beauty pageant. Rising all the way to the position of "Miss Europe," she then gives it all up for the working class man she loves. But she finds that life as a housewife in a dreary walk up flat is killing her soul, as is her jealous husband, and eventually she walks out when she gets a chance at a film contract. But her husband won't let her go and the film builds to a tragic ending that is still considered one of the best climatic scenes in film history.This film features strong direction, extremely exciting location photography by famed cinematographer (and later director) Rudolph Mate and an intelligent,Spartan script by Rene Clair.But the wonder of the film is Brooks herself. Although her voice is dubbed by a French actress (Brooks didn't speak French) the film was initially planned as a silent and in large chunks of it, her character doesn't speak, anyway. But Brooks' fortune was her face and what she could do with it and there are few in film history who could do more. While there are some echos of silent film technique in her work, she was so far ahead of her time that most of her performance seems as fresh today as it did in 1929. Whether she is the unhappy girl being dragged by her boyfriend through a working class mob at a carnaval, or the depressed housewife staring into a canary's cage and feeling just as trapped, Brooks is a revelation.But it is when she is happy in this film that Brooks simply leaps off the screen at you. In most of the still photos she shot over the years, Brooks doesn't smile, apparently because she'd promised herself not to ever wear one of those pasted on grins found on showgirls on stage. But when called upon in a film to express happiness, no one ever exceeded Brooks, who may be the most magnetic actress in film history.While "Pandora's Box" will always be her signature film, "Prix de Beaute" ranks a close second in my mind as the best film work of her career.

Originally shot as a silent but a dubbed version was also released (I saw the dubbed version). It was clearly a big budget picture, which mainly shows in the shots of the beauty pageant and some of the female costumes.Louise Brooks' performance is the main reason to see the film. Also interesting for views of the time, for example, seeing a Linotype machine in action.