GW Pabst is one of those directors film history keeps in a display case — essential, admired, and slightly underread outside specialist circles. He gave Greta Garbo her second lead role, made Louise Brooks an international star with Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, and did it all in Weimar Germany with a social conscience that felt genuinely radical. Angela Christlieb's documentary Pandora's Legacy has access to his personal archive — letters, family albums, the works — and makes the smart choice to use that material to interrogate the man rather than celebrate him. The interrogation lands. Pabst's grandchildren Marion, Daniel, and Ben describe a patriarch who inspired fear in his sons rather than affection. His wife Gertrude, who stayed married to him for over 40 years, gave up her own acting ambitions at his insistence and underwent seven abortions to avoid disrupting his career. The gap between the cinema's champion of strong-willed women and the domestic autocrat at home is real, and the film earns credit for naming it directly rather than softening it into complexity-as-excuse. But Christlieb's structural choices work against her. The recurring move — cutting from a difficult biographical revelation to a scene from one of Pabst's films — reads as a shorthand the film hasn't earned. It implies a diagnostic link between the life and the work that is both too easy and too crude: the suggestion that because he controlled women at home, his cinematic women tell us something about his psychology, or vice versa, flattens both the films and the people who lived alongside him. The approach showcases the brilliance of his filmography at the cost of making the films serve a biographical argument they weren't made to support. The other structural wobble is the detours into what the grandchildren have done professionally. These sections are not uninteresting — there's something poignant about tracing a difficult legacy across generations — but they eat screen time that could have gone to Gertrude, whose story is the emotional core the film keeps circling without quite centering. Seven abortions in service of a husband's career, a lifetime of deferred ambition: that is the story. The documentary sees it but doesn't hold the frame there long enough. What saves Pandora's Legacy is the archive itself. There's a quality to intimate personal material — letters in a handwriting you can't quite read, photographs that show a person rather than a director — that no amount of critical prose can replicate. Pabst comes through as genuinely complicated rather than simply hypocritical, and Gertrude emerges as a figure who deserves her own film. Christlieb's documentary is not that film. But it is the documentary that makes the case for why someone should make it.
