Arena — Season 1, Episode 272: Louise Brooks
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
The American film actress Louise Brooks, who died last summer, was one of the most celebrated beauties in the history of the cinema. Her performance as unrepentant pleasure-seeker Lulu in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box made her a legend. KENNETH TYNAN wrote: 'She has run through my life like a magnetic thread, this shameless urchin tomboy ... a temptress with no pretentions, amoral but totally selfless.' Louise Brooks's own life had more than a touch of Lulu's reckless abandon about it. In tonight's Arena, she talks candidly about her greatest days in Paris and Berlin and of the harsh retribution that was exacted by Hollywood. With rare clips from her varied screen performances.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.