Die 3-groschen-oper
G W Pabst (1931)
The film programmer Margaret Deriaz gave an excellent introduction to this BFI screening of The Threepenny Opera. She was informative about the making of G W Pabst’s film and the legal disputes with the original authors that it generated. She very clearly placed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s theatre musical – a succès fou when first staged in Berlin in 1928 – in its cultural and political context. The version that BFI showed included a prologue, inserted in an East German reissue of the late 1940s, in which two of the film’s main actors, Ernst Buch and Fritz Rasp, reflect on its harmony with Communist thinking. At the time of its original release, however, plenty of Marxists deplored what they considered a blatantly capitalist undertaking and were hardly better disposed to the film than the Nazis, who banned it in 1933.
The Threepenny Opera is an essential artefact of the Weimar Republic and the visual style of Pabst’s film confirms the place and time in which it was made. (The cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner’s other credits in the 1920s and early 1930s include Nosferatu, M and The Testament of Dr Mabuse.) The surprising, sometimes discomfiting camera movement, long dark shadows and twisty stairways are so characteristic of contemporary German expressionist cinema that the nineteenth-century London setting of the story – the days leading up to Victoria’s coronation – always seems weirdly artificial. (Brecht and Weill’s inspiration was The Beggar’s Opera, John Gay’s 1728 stage entertainment, with its cast of London lowlifes and their social ‘betters’. Gay’s aristocratic targets became bourgeois ones in The Threepenny Opera.) The inter-war Germanic substrate of the film is sealed by one of its retrospective qualities. In the closing stages, as crowds of have-nots trudge through the streets, they irresistibly bring to mind other, real ghetto faces of the period.
The musical highlights come courtesy of Ernst Buch and Lotte Lenya. The strong-faced Buch, in the role of the street singer, gets things off to a splendid start with his rendition of The Threepenny Opera‘s most famous number, ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’ (one of those songs whose melody means it could go on for ever, whose ending seems almost comically arbitrary). As the prostitute Jenny, Lenya, with her natural eccentricity and flair, gives the film a shot in the arm with her delivery of ‘Seeräuberjenny’. It’s a positive turning point: from here on, the plot gathers pace. The wedding of Mackie Messer and Polly Peachum, along with the events surrounding it, has been slower, harder going. As the dandified crime boss Mackie (Mack the Knife), Rudolf Forster is good whenever he gives the camera a menacing level stare but neither he nor Fritz Rasp (Peachum) is exciting to watch. Carola Neher as Polly has the presence of a fine actress. Margaret Deriaz gave forewarning that Reinhold Schünzel, as the police chief Tiger-Brown, plays in an exuberant musical-comedy style. In contrast, the white horse on which Tiger-Brown appears at one point and that wanders off after he’s dismounted, is a nicely deadpan performer. Vladimir Sokoloff, excellent as Mackie’s duped jailer, is one of several cast members who also appeared in the French-language version of the film that Pabst made at the same time as this German one.
23 May 2018
