Just in case you're studying German...
Sep. 25th, 2007 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lsandersonCritic’s Choice
New DVDs
By DAVE KEHR
THE 3 PENNY OPERA
Traditionally, G. W. Pabst’s 1931 film of “The 3 Penny Opera” was considered a disappointment, interesting mainly because it was the closest in time to the original stage production. The Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical opened in Berlin in 1928 and quickly became an international hit.
Pabst, known for social-psychological dramas like “The Joyless Street” (1925) and “Pandora’s Box” (1929), was an understandable choice by the producers, but not, as it turned out, a particularly happy one. Apparently uncomfortable with characters bursting into song, the sober-minded Pabst threw out several numbers and curtailed others, while forcing Brecht’s anti-realist, anti-theater into a conventional realist mode.
Or so it seemed, until the German-language version of the film was restored by the German film archive in 2005. Drawn from the original camera negative, this version is being released today by the Criterion Collection, and it’s a revelation. With the images restored to a digital approximation of their original clarity and depth, it seems quite a different movie.
The film takes place not in a real world but in an almost cubist approximation of one. A labyrinth of shop fronts, storehouses, narrow streets and crooked alleys, where the billboards are in English but the protest placards are in German, was built inside a mammoth studio. It represents the London waterfront where Weill and Brecht’s politically charged revision of John Gay’s 18th-century satire takes place.
Huge interior sets were a specialty of the Weimar cinema, exemplified by the grand hotel of F. W. Murnau’s “Last Laugh” (1924) and the Berlin boulevard of Joe May’s “Asphalt” (1929). But Pabst, working with the art director Andrej Andrejew and the cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, might have created the most detailed and expressive.
The mobile camera seems determined to explore every nook and cranny of this tall and curiously built environment, from the pier where the street singer (Ernst Busch) relates the tale of Mack the Knife, to the warehouse where Mackie marries Polly Peachum (Carola Neher) to the bordello that is home to Mackie’s spurned lover, Jenny (Lotte Lenya).
Mackie Messer is played by Rudolf Forster as a cold, solid block of a man, a pillar of malevolence who draws the innocent-seeming Polly to him with one magnetic look. Polly, of course, is no shrinking virgin but the daughter of London’s beggar king, Peachum, played by Weimar’s most creative interpreter of evil, Fritz Rasp.
As Tiger Brown, Mackie’s old buddy from the British Army and the current chief of the London police, Pabst cast Reinhold Schünzel, a writer-director whose 1933 “Viktor und Viktoria” was remade several times, most famously by Blake Edwards as “Victor Victoria” in 1982.
And yet it is Lenya, Weill’s wife and a member of the original stage cast, who most memorably embodies the piece’s bitterly cynical yet profoundly humanitarian spirit. Here she performs “Pirate Jenny,” that heart-wrenching ballad of lyrical revenge, standing motionless before a window as Pabst cuts in on her in three progressive close-ups, leaving her isolated and astonished by her own repressed cruelty.
The Criterion edition also includes the French-language version, “L’Opéra de Quat’Sous,” which Pabst filmed on the same sets, using largely the same shots but a French cast. The French version is not nearly as gripping, and not only because the music drifts toward operetta when sung in trained French voices. The casting of two conventionally attractive movie stars — Albert Préjean as Mackie, and Florelle as Polly Peachum — also strips away the hard, tawdry sexuality of the German version.
What’s missing, too, in this less well preserved, much softer and flatter print, is precisely the presence of Pabst’s imagined London. Detached from the more faintly registered backgrounds, unimplicated in the receding perspectives of Pabst’s compositions, these are simply actors standing in front of a set.
Here again is proof of what a fragile medium the movies are, and of how foolish it is for us to condescend to the perceived primitivism of a past that is largely a creation of our own neglect. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated)
New DVDs
By DAVE KEHR
THE 3 PENNY OPERA
Traditionally, G. W. Pabst’s 1931 film of “The 3 Penny Opera” was considered a disappointment, interesting mainly because it was the closest in time to the original stage production. The Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical opened in Berlin in 1928 and quickly became an international hit.
Pabst, known for social-psychological dramas like “The Joyless Street” (1925) and “Pandora’s Box” (1929), was an understandable choice by the producers, but not, as it turned out, a particularly happy one. Apparently uncomfortable with characters bursting into song, the sober-minded Pabst threw out several numbers and curtailed others, while forcing Brecht’s anti-realist, anti-theater into a conventional realist mode.
Or so it seemed, until the German-language version of the film was restored by the German film archive in 2005. Drawn from the original camera negative, this version is being released today by the Criterion Collection, and it’s a revelation. With the images restored to a digital approximation of their original clarity and depth, it seems quite a different movie.
The film takes place not in a real world but in an almost cubist approximation of one. A labyrinth of shop fronts, storehouses, narrow streets and crooked alleys, where the billboards are in English but the protest placards are in German, was built inside a mammoth studio. It represents the London waterfront where Weill and Brecht’s politically charged revision of John Gay’s 18th-century satire takes place.
Huge interior sets were a specialty of the Weimar cinema, exemplified by the grand hotel of F. W. Murnau’s “Last Laugh” (1924) and the Berlin boulevard of Joe May’s “Asphalt” (1929). But Pabst, working with the art director Andrej Andrejew and the cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, might have created the most detailed and expressive.
The mobile camera seems determined to explore every nook and cranny of this tall and curiously built environment, from the pier where the street singer (Ernst Busch) relates the tale of Mack the Knife, to the warehouse where Mackie marries Polly Peachum (Carola Neher) to the bordello that is home to Mackie’s spurned lover, Jenny (Lotte Lenya).
Mackie Messer is played by Rudolf Forster as a cold, solid block of a man, a pillar of malevolence who draws the innocent-seeming Polly to him with one magnetic look. Polly, of course, is no shrinking virgin but the daughter of London’s beggar king, Peachum, played by Weimar’s most creative interpreter of evil, Fritz Rasp.
As Tiger Brown, Mackie’s old buddy from the British Army and the current chief of the London police, Pabst cast Reinhold Schünzel, a writer-director whose 1933 “Viktor und Viktoria” was remade several times, most famously by Blake Edwards as “Victor Victoria” in 1982.
And yet it is Lenya, Weill’s wife and a member of the original stage cast, who most memorably embodies the piece’s bitterly cynical yet profoundly humanitarian spirit. Here she performs “Pirate Jenny,” that heart-wrenching ballad of lyrical revenge, standing motionless before a window as Pabst cuts in on her in three progressive close-ups, leaving her isolated and astonished by her own repressed cruelty.
The Criterion edition also includes the French-language version, “L’Opéra de Quat’Sous,” which Pabst filmed on the same sets, using largely the same shots but a French cast. The French version is not nearly as gripping, and not only because the music drifts toward operetta when sung in trained French voices. The casting of two conventionally attractive movie stars — Albert Préjean as Mackie, and Florelle as Polly Peachum — also strips away the hard, tawdry sexuality of the German version.
What’s missing, too, in this less well preserved, much softer and flatter print, is precisely the presence of Pabst’s imagined London. Detached from the more faintly registered backgrounds, unimplicated in the receding perspectives of Pabst’s compositions, these are simply actors standing in front of a set.
Here again is proof of what a fragile medium the movies are, and of how foolish it is for us to condescend to the perceived primitivism of a past that is largely a creation of our own neglect. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated)
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so go and make a plan...
Date: 2007-09-26 04:11 am (UTC)Now I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks for noting this review.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 02:34 pm (UTC)