His films were the pride of pioneer art cinemas, the favourites of the first film clubs. Westfront was hailed in 1930 as the most effective anti-war film ever made; a year later his movie version of The Threepenny Opera introduced Lotte Lenya to the world. Greta Garbo starred in his 1925 film Joyless Street, before she was screen-tested by Hollywood a year later. And his casting of Louise Brooks in the role of Lulu for Pandora's Box resulted in one of the defining performances of the 20th century. Yet now Georg Wilhelm Pabst is forgotten, a "nowhere man", as a German critic recently put it.
Tony Rayns, who has programmed a forthcoming season of early Pabst films at the National Film Theatre, hails Pabst as "a giant of German cinema", but concedes that Pabst's reputation is "confusing and confounding". Many critics have gone further, accusing Pabst of "taking refuge in technique", of being an opportunist and, even worse, a traitor to the cause, and a spy. So why does one of cinema's most innovative and versatile directors attract such mixed feelings?
Pabst had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He spent the first world war in a French internment camp because he was in Paris when hostilities broke out in 1914. He was in Austria, and therefore within Nazi territory, when the second world war started in September 1939. This might not have mattered if Pabst had been a journeyman director. But by the time the second world war broke out he was an idol of those among the European intelligentsia who equated the democratic medium of motion pictures with art and a social conscience.
Although he came late to movies, the 37-year-old Pabst was eminently qualified to direct when he made his first film in 1924. Not only had he studied engineering in Vienna and so learned many of movie-making's technical skills; but he had also acted on stages all over Europe and America. However, it was his perceptiveness off the set that marked him out. "What is distinctive about Pabst," says Rayns, "is the intellectual enquiry that he brought to films. He looked around his culture and picked up on issues, particularly social issues. In Joyless Street, for instance, he showed how inflation affected middle-class and working women and cast them into poverty; and later on, in his version of The Threepenny Opera, he tackled crime, hypocrisy and class. In fact, all his early films show a clear left-wing alignment along with a keen eye for the interdependence of money, power and sex."
Pabst, who made the first serious film about Freud - Secrets of a Soul in 1926 - was interested in psychology rather than sociology. And he had a particular preoccupation with the battle of the sexes. In his first films the protagonist was nearly always a woman; and by 1928 he felt his reputation was sufficiently secure to put Germany's favourite fictional female, Lulu from Frank Wedekind's stage hit Pandora's Box, on to the screen.
Everything in Wedekind's play revolves around Lulu. But where was Pabst to find her? There was fierce speculation about whom Pabst would cast. The director scoured Europe and finally settled on Marlene Dietrich. But just as she was about to sign up, word came through that Pabst's original choice - a little-known contract player from Paramount called Louise Brooks - had got on the boat to Bremen and could be on set the following Monday. "Imagine Pabst choosing Louise Brooks for Lulu," Dietrich flounced, "when he could have had me!"
Brooks's Lulu has become an icon. But she took the part only because her American lover, George Preston Marshall, needed "a relaxing trip to Europe". On the set her co-star Fritz Kortner wouldn't talk to her because he thought she wasn't doing anything. She was just there. Aside from Pabst, the only person who sympathised with the 22-year-old American was her costumier, who thought that she was out of her depth and "the worst actress in the world".
But none of this mattered. Pabst was in control. Just as well, for Brooks didn't take her role all that seriously. She was stewed most of the time on a mixture of Weimar nightlife and early-morning martinis. But Pabst had an uncanny ability of finding actresses just when they were ready to explode into a part. "With an intelligent actor he would sit in exhaustive explanation," Brooks wrote in her memoirs, "with an old ham he would speak the language of the theatre. But in my case, by some magic he would saturate me with one clear emotion and turn me loose." Yet Brooks's performance is not a one-off: Pabst had pulled off the trick three years before with Greta Garbo in Joyless Street. Then, though, he added technical skill to his emotional prompting. Garbo was so overcome by nervousness at the prospect of playing her first big role outside her native Sweden that her movements were jerky, and therefore too fast for the camera. Film historian Kevin Brownlow reveals that Pabst's solution was ingenious. At the last minute, the director imported special Kodak film to soften Garbo's image and bring out the angles on her face while also instructing his cameraman to pull the handle on his camera faster so that her staccato movements were slowed down on the screen.
Yet, ironically, it was this very brand of spontaneous skill that would lead to Georg Pabst's undoing. After 1933, along with many others in the German film industry, Pabst refused to work under the Nazis, and sought work in Hollywood. But he wasn't prepared to dilute his talent. On his one Hollywood film, A Modern Hero, Warner Brothers complained that Pabst was giving his leading actress "too much freedom" and, unaware that the German director was one of the creators of "invisible editing" - where shots are edited in the director's head - the studio demanded that Pabst shoot more footage so they could re-edit his work and make the final cut.
For Pabst the experience was commercially and aesthetically disastrous, and perhaps affected his judgment when he crossed over from Switzerland into Nazi-occupied Austria in August 1939. Later, Pabst explained his actions with a flurry of excuses: he had tickets booked on the liner Normandy in his pocket; he had to have a hernia operation in Vienna; he had to dispose of family property and he had to take his mother with him to America. Whatever his motives, Germany's invasion of Poland the following month meant that Pabst literally missed the boat.
After the war all his excuses were dismissed by the grande dame of German film, Lotte Eisner, who remembers telling Pabst "rather harshly" that "the man with the perfect alibi is always the guilty one". During the war Pabst was ordered by Joseph Goebbels to make a couple of anodyne movies; but after the war the director didn't help his cause by never making any statement of regret. For his German followers, who were waiting for him in America and who knew him as "the red Pabst", this refusal was tantamount to an act of betrayal. The accusations must have cut deep. Pabst never gained his old momentum. As Eisner said, "The films he shot after that lacked the old strength. It was not the old Pabst - the strong man of the left wing."
Why Pabst took such a fateful decision remains a mystery. Maybe it was the prospect of an inconsequential Hollywood career that prompted him to stay in Europe. Looking back on his achievement before he made the choice that muddied his reputation until his death in 1967, Brooks compared Pabst to the Animal Trainer who opens Wedekind's play, striding out of a circus tent with a whip in one hand and a loaded revolver in the other. "The finest job of casting GW Pabst ever did was casting himself as the director, the Animal Tamer. Never a sentimental trick did this whip hand permit the actors assembled to play his beasts. The revolver he shot straight into the heart of the audience."
· The Early Pabst season opens at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 (020-7928 3232) on February 1.