The Criterion Collection released a DVD of G.W. Pabst’s 1929 classic Pandora’s Box in 2006. Three years later a 2K restoration of the film was made by the George Eastman House financed by Hugh Hefner. That restoration is the source of Criterion’s new Blu-ray edition which includes all the extras from the DVD release.

The film, which is set in Weimar Berlin, is about the rise and inevitable fall of an amoral but naive young woman whose insouciant eroticism inspires lust and violence in those around her. Pabst, who helped discover Greta Garbo and other European stars in the 1920s, did a worldwide search to find his Lulu, the film’s central character. He was intrigued by Hollywood starlet Louise Brooks in Howard Hawks’ 1928 film, A Girl in Every Port and asked to borrow her from Paramount, the studio for which she was under contract. They refused without even telling Brooks about the offer. Pabst was about to reluctantly give the role to Marlene Dietrich who he thought was too worldly for the part when he received a call from Brooks. Paramount had told her about the offer when they later fired her.

The film opens with Brooks’ Lulu entertaining her latest bourgeois admirer (Fritz Kortner) while her old pimp (Carl Goetz) hides on her balcony. Kortner’s showman son (Francis Lederer) is also attracted to Lulu, and she knows that, setting them up against one another. Kortner is engaged to another woman, so Lulu arranges for the woman and Lederer to find her and Kortner in an assignation on the wardrobe floor of Lederer’s show. Kortner must now marry Lulu. At their wedding, Lulu tangos with a female admirer and receives a declaration of love from Lederer leading to an encounter with Kortner in which he attempts to shoot her only to have Lulu shoot him instead.

Put on trial for murdering Kortner, Lulu is found guilty but escapes with the help of the courtroom mob before the police can lock her up. She hides in Kortner’s apartment where Lederer finds her and escapes with her with forged passports. She is almost sold to an Egyptian brothel when she and Lederer escape again. On Christmas Eve, she, Lederer, and her old pimp Goetz are living in London where she is now picking up tricks on the street. Her last trick is Jack the Ripper.

The film was a sensational flop everywhere it played from Berlin to Paris to New York, but Brooks was a sensation, her trademark bangs even turning up on a popular new comic strip heroine, Ella Cinders.

Pabst and Brooks then made the equally sensational Diary of a Lost Girl which was equally unsuccessful at the time. Pabst would then turn his focus to Westfront 1918, the German equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Brooks returned to Hollywood where she made a few films in small parts, the last one a 1936 western opposite John Wayne. Francis Lederer also went to Hollywood where he continued to make films into the 1970s, his most famous role being the title character in 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy. He would live to be 100, dying in 2000.

Pandora’s Box was rediscovered in the 1950s making Brooks a star all over again. This time, however, she resurfaced as a writer, not as an actress. She died in 1985 at 78.

Extras include Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu, a 1998 TCM documentary narrated by Shirley MacLaine. Interviewees include the then 98-year-old Francis Lederer. Also included is 1971’s Lulu in Berlin an interview with Brooks by Richard Leacock and Susan Steinberg Woll and on-screen interviews from 2002 with Leacock and 2006 with Pabst’s son Michael who died two years later.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film, To Catch a Thief has been given a 4K UHD upgrade by Paramount Presents. The long-anticipated upgrade is a huge improvement over previous home releases of the film in which the colors always looked washed out.

To Catch a Thief was not one of Hitchcock’s great films or even one of his great 1950s films. It was certainly not in the same league as Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. It did, however, have two things going for it. One was its Oscar-winning cinematography which finally looks like it should on this home video release. The other was its then-shocking use of double entendres.

By the middle of the 1950s, Hitchcock knew exactly how to play the censors who by then were betwixt and between their earlier moral rigidity and wanting to appear as friendly toward the filmmakers as they reasonably could. The trick, working with scenarist John Michael Hayes, was to put in as many questionable lines and scenes in the screenplay as they could think of, and then agree to take them out when the censors complained so that they could insist on keeping the lines and scenarios that they had always wanted to be in the film, knowing that the censors would always agree to let them have something.

The plot was the standard Hitchcock plot of the wrong man, who must work to prove himself innocent by finding the real culprit. In this case, he was a former jewel thief suspected of being behind a recent spate of thefts using his modus operandi on the French Riviera.

Cary Grant, who turned 50 in 1954, had decided he was too old to be playing romantic leading men and was on the verge of retiring when Hitchcock persuaded him to play just one more such role opposite 25-year-old Grace Kelly. The film was such a success for him that Grant stayed around another 11 years before finally calling it quits while still at the top of his game. Kelly, on the other hand, met her prince during filming and would soon exit the screen to become Princess Grace of Monaco after making just two more films, 1956’s High Society and The Swan.

The film’s key supporting roles are played by Jessie Royce Landis as Kelly’s mother and John Williams as an insurance investigator who helps Grant uncover the fraudster.

Williams had previously worked with Hitchcock and Kelly reprising his Tony Award-winning role as the inspector in 1954’s Dial M for Murder. Landis, who was only 8 years older than Grant, would play his mother in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest four years later.

Extras include a question-and-answer session between Hitchcock’s daughter Pat and granddaughter Mary Stone with students at the UCLA Film School from a previous home video release.

Happy viewing.