Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Tuesday, 09 October 2007
G.W. Pabst: The Threepenny Opera
The Threepenny Opera. Directed by G.W. Pabst. Screenplay by Bela Balazs, Leo Lania and Ladislaus Vajda, from the play by Bertolt Brecht. Songs composed by Kurt Weill. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. Edited by Hans Oser. Art direction by Andrej Andrejew. With Rudolf Forster (Mackie Messer), Carola Neher (Polly Peachum), Reinhold Schunzel (Tiger Brown), Fritz Rasp (Peachum), Lotte Lenya (Jenny) and Ernst Busch (The Street Singer). Germany, 1931. Running time: 105 minutes. DVD released through The Criterion Collection. The Kurt Weill Foundation maintains this Web site with an extensive background and history of the play.
What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank? – Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
The streets and buildings are carved from stone and eerily lit in G.W. Pabst's 1931 film of The Threepenny Opera, available now from The Criterion Collection in a new restoration. Designed with more than a glance to Expressionism, the film retains the identification of Victorian London with Weimar Berlin; the camera sinuously snakes, like Mackie Messer himself, through the alleyways, basements and offices of the urban landscape. This is, easily, a true black-and-white underworld. Mackie himself, while dapper and well-dressed, is a rapist, arsonist and murderer; the whores are given the most lush accommodations among the characters of this world. As Brecht wished (despite a lawsuit he instigated to stop the film), it's no longer the fun romp through a Guys and Dolls ambiance that it had become, but an incisive critique of the bourgeois world, and it also retains the sweet aura of desiccated sexuality that permeated the German theatre and culture of the time. (Neher's Polly, through the first half of the film wearing a tight, bright white wedding dress that seems to glow, is a fetishistic object of false innocence and becomes, at times, even a more central character than Macheath; this provides an echo of the tormented sexuality present in Brecht's early plays like Baal, Drums in the Night and Edward II.)
There are other ways, too, in which it's not the Threepenny Opera with which we're most familiar. Only half of the music is retained (most sadly, the "Tango-Ballad" in which Macheath and Jenny describe, in song, the circumstances surrounding the abortion of their child was dropped, for fear of censorship problems, early in the production process); the plot elements are rearranged and shifted, and, rather than a near-hanging, the film now ends with the four principal characters founding a bank. Mackie himself is a middle-aged, graying Rudolf Forster, not Sting nor Raul Julia nor Alan Cumming, three recent Macheaths. The film however does the singular service of preserving three of the most mesmerising performances from the original Berlin production – Neher, Lenya and Busch – and the musical direction is by Theo Mackeben, who also presided over the music at the 1928 Schiffbauerdamm premiere.
Pabst's Threepenny Opera is mostly his own; those who seek a truer rendition of the Brecht/Weill original will have to look elsewhere. (Unfortunately, the sparkling Columbia recording of the Richard Foreman/Stanley Silverman Threepenny Opera from the mid-1970s, which restored Weill's original score and orchestrations, remains out-of-print, as does the 1956 recording of the full score in the original German language, supervised by Lenya and something of a benchmark, for all its faults.) But Pabst does cut to the criminal core of the original, which continues to remain relevant. The DVD also contains an informative 49-minute documentary, featuring Eric Bentley, Weill expert Kim Kowalke, Pabst scholar Jan-Christopher Horak and Pabst's son Michael, about the origin and history of both the play and the film.
Posted at 9.11 am in /Film
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