G.W. Pabst’s Weimar-era sound motion picture THE 3 PENNY OPERA exists in two versions, one in German and another in French with different cast, this is the German one, an archetype musical traverses through Brecht’s urtext with expressive decor and mise en scène.
Originally a musical stage play from Brecht and musician Kurt Weill, Pabst punctuates the satirical narrative with barebones singing performances(more recitative than euphonies) and a harbor-side raconteur (Busch), and dulls the edge of the play’s lampooning of capitalism with more diverting atmospherics.
In late-Victorian London, Mackie Messer (Forster) is the ringleader of a local gangster group, ditches her brothel lover Jenny (Lenya) and off the hoof marries the ladylike Polly (Neher), unaware that she is the daughter of Mr. Peachum (Rasp), the “king of the beggars”. After a comical wedding ceremony in an empty warehouse with his stolen props, and a reluctant, scare-easy pastor (Thimig), Mr. Peachum threatens Tiger Brown (Schünzel), the Chief of Police, to arrest Mackie, or he will march his beggar armies to ruin the upcoming coronation parade. A dithering Brown, who is a former comrade-in-arms and dear friend of Mackie, grudgingly complies, but the turn of the events quickly gets out of his hands, not least is the burglars-go-straight volte-face, tinted with a progressive message about gynecocracy, and at the end of the day, the trenchant irony is that bank business becomes the new gangsterdom.
While the performance is mostly stagey - the bowler-clad, raffish Forster is nonchalant from stem to stern, a demure Neher (whose own personal tragedy during the WWII would overshadow her final screen presence) keeps her character alive and kicking with nothing much to offer; Schünzel is the comic relief here, discombobulated and antsy while Rasp is a feckless tinpot leader, but the real deal here is Lenya, with her unusual underbite, she can belt out poignantly, but in the next breath, stuns as a cunning vamp who can sell her lover down the river, yet, that isn’t her verdict -, Pabst gins up the beggar-belief storytelling with steadfast visual idioms (superimpositions, dolly shots, including an antic of a self-elevating bowler!), and really goes the distance with
the marching lumbering mass climax, zombie-like and unstoppable, the proletariat power wanes in favor of a veiled validation of capitalism, for sure Brecht is not happy about that.
