L'opéra de quat'sous

You have to appreciate this is from a time when a battle was being fought over the soul of Germany from the streets to the screen. That was true when Brecht wrote the play, and even more so three years later in this film incarnation. On one side you had Pabst, socially-conscious, humanist, and on the opposite end Riefenstahl's visions of mystical , sensuous and heaven-defying purity (and all that prefigures).

And I write this from a country that experiences an eerily similar situation almost a century later, is ravaged by recession, well-to-do people of three years ago are now sleeping in benches, and that horror and despair has brought actual neo-Nazis in the parliament and racial hate in the streets. So, this hits unexpectedly close to home, and makes me lament that we don't have talents of Pabst's calibre.

Ingenious moments in this extremely cynical vision of a world ruled by money include a 'king of beggars' who runs a powerful beggar-union of fake beggars, and a crook who is sprung from prison only to discover he is president of a London bank.

Pabst plays free and loose with Brecht's text, drops several musical numbers, and makes at least two powerful additions of his own: his ire is aimed at both left and right, with the beggar-union clearly standing in for socialists (their slogans include "give to be given back") who exploit the despair of the people for petty gains, and goes on to show a public riot (only threatened in Brecht) that ends not in triumphant Soviet-revolution but failure and obscurity.

The guy (with his team of close collaborators) was a genius, just not necessarily in this field.

Individual scenes are superb, but the whole feels sluggish and protracted. Scenes open several moments before we need the information and end several moments later. And for a film like this, you need a Marx Bros - Dr. Strangelove madcap rhythm to keep the zap of ferocious energy from dissipating.

But you just need to look at the opening to see what these guys were capable of, what astounding visual language they had refined.

The sparsity works because they're not going for comedic effect yet. It could be the opening to any type of film, say a melodrama. We are introduced to our crook through a public show in the Italian manner, sung and pointing to illustrated panels of the action (our film), and go on to meet him as he courts and swiftly convinces a young girl to marriage. All of that happens in a matter of minutes, no more than four scenes tops. There is a minimum of dialogue. The courting - a dance of seduction - happens in a dance club, and is actually shown as other couples dancing. We don't hear what he says to her, only lips moving. We only find out later (maybe) when she sings about it.

Pabst was the master of allusive filmmaking in the late silent era. You just can't afford to miss his Diary of a Lost Girl.

These days, Eisenstein is the backbone of MTV. You can see Riefenstahl's mark all over the coverage of sports and public events. Expressionism has been made cute and pop. Unlike them, this mode of using a scene to portray unseen bits of narrative that would have been wholly ordinary if simply shown is still new and untapped.

Those who acquired a taste for 1920s Berlin in 'Cabaret' ought to see this film inasmuch as it is the real thing. Lotte Lenya (Weill's wife in real life and the actress who played the evil Rosa Kleb in 'From Russia With Love') and Carola Neher (fled Hitler for the Soviet Union then betrayed by communism -- she died in a communist prison camp in 1942) each offer an unforgettable singing performance. Carola Neher's song alone is worth the price of admission -- she outclasses even Dietrich.

Sometimes, if I ever feel especially depressed at something going off in the world I like to trot this one out to make me take an even more jaundiced view of things. This surely would be no. 1 in the Top 100 Most Cynical Movies Ever, even after all these years (the simultaneous French version is not so earthy, a more flowery artiness coming out instead). For me, it's the best movie I've seen of Pabst's, most of his post-WW2 stuff has eluded me so far.

The Guild Of Thieves' leader gets married to the Guild of Beggars' leader's daughter, causing friction between the two highly organised and respected professions, but inertia in the police who are in the Thieves' power. Prostitution, aberration, bigamy, thievery, extortion, bribery, corruption (and complete cynically cheerful indifference to it all), you name it it's here - after all it is all that Man can do! Laconic-looking Ernst Busch's searing inter-ditties leave you with the distinct impression that someone was rather tired with the world! The savage sounding German words spew out, whilst reading the English subtitles is sometimes heavy going in digesting all of the conceptual opinions in time to digest the next. Would that Bobby Darin had got his tonsils round a few more of the extraordinary gossamer Brecht/Weill songs from this! Lotte Lenya sparkled doing her Pirate Jenny number, being just a part of my favourite bit in the idling whorehouse.

All of the people involved in 3G are "lost to sight", except to the handful of Artheads who occasionally hold cultural revivals of Weill, Brecht or Pabst. There was a memorable series of events in London in 2000 to mark the 50th anniversary of Weill's death, but 99.99% of the general public passed it by.

Soon we will all be lost to sight too, along with all of our fractious opinions and silly vices.

The movie isn't a filmed version of the stage play and doesn't pretend to be. It moves along at a sometimes creaky, sometimes disjointed pace. And when does it take place? There was no coronation of anybody in Victorian England, and I don't believe they had telephones. But those are quibbles. The thrill of it is the art direction - the expressionistic sets, set decoration and costumes are wonders. All those steep staircases! Those "London" streets! Terrific.

I wonder if some of the disjointed sequences and odd pacing of the movie result from the fact that it's a reconstruction, the original having gone the way of all entartete art in Nazi Germany.

In London, the rascal Mackie Messer (Rudolf Forster) is the king of the thieves and an irresistible pimp. When he meets Polly Peachum (Valeska Gert) on the street, he invites her for a drink and they marry with each other in the end of the night in a warehouse. When Polly's father Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Fritz Rasp) a.k.a. the king of the beggars learns about the marriage of his daughter, he presses the chief of police Jackie "Tiger" Brown (Reinhold Schünzel) to arrest his friend Mackie; otherwise he will send a great number of beggars to protest in the coronation of the queen.

"Die 3 Groschen-Oper" is a cynical musical with low-life characters in the underground of London written by Bertold Brecht and directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. This film was released in Berlin on 19 February 1931 and I saw a DVD with a matrix that was restored in 2006 for the 75th anniversary of this film. In 1986, the Brazilian composer Chico Buarque de Holanda and the director Ruy Guerra released an adaptation of this musical with the successful "Ópera do Malandro", the most expensive Brazilian production until 1986, but without the credit to Bertold Brecht. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "A Ópera dos Três Vinténs" ("The Opera of Three Pennies")