THE THREEPENNY OPERA Movie Review

Die Dreigroschenoper
L'Opera de Quat'Sous
Beggars’ Opera

Set in the Soho section of London in the late 19th century, G.W. Pabst's 1931 screen adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's brilliant reworking of John Gay's The Beggar‘s Opera is a near-perfect melding of director and subject. The creator of a number of classic German “street” films such as The Joyless Street and Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst had a relationship with the underside of Berlin in the 1920s that was similar to that which Martin Scorsese would have with New York's Little Italy in the 1970s.The Threepenny Opera’s cast of thieves, beggars, and prostitutes may be walking the streets of Victorian London, but for Germany in 1931 the mood of cynicism, despair, and tragedy couldn't be closer to home. The Threepenny Opera has been cut, censored, condensed, and reworked over the years, but most of the versions circulating in the last decade have been fully restored (the sound quality remains poor, however, but doesn't seriously diminish the picture's still-remarkable impact). With Rudolph Forster as Mack the Knife, Carola Neher as Polly Peachum, Ernst Busch as the Street Singer, and the legendary Lotte Lenya as Jenny, the part she would own for the rest of her life.

NEXT STOP … The Joyless Street, Pandora's Box, The Beggar's Opera

1931 107m/B Rudolph Forster, Lotte Lenya, Carola Neher, Reinhold Schunzel, Fritz Rasp, Valeska Gert, Ernst Busch; D: G.W. Pabst; W: Ladislao Vajda, Bela Balazs, Leo Lania; C: Fritz Arno Wagner; M: Kurt Weill. VHS VDM, AUD, HEG