L'opéra de quat'sous

G.W. Pabst's version of 'The 3penny Opera' is simply sublime with a formidable casting and a magnificent cast with: Ernst Busch as a street singer, Carola Neher, who died in a soviet prison, as Polly and Lotte Lenya as Jenny. The mass scenes (without the help of computer games) are nothing less than masterful. But, above all are the texts of Bertolt Brecht and the magical songs by Kurt Weill; just delicious stuff.

This eternal masterpiece doesn't paint a rosy picture of human affairs, with a city (pars pro toto – the world) in the hands of people with shark teeth, venal civil servants and a corrupt police force. Bertolt Brecht formulates in simple words the rules of the game, the basics of human society: first grub, then morals. If the primary conditions for human survival (food, safety) are not available, then there is absolutely no ground for any kind of morality. For Bertolt Brecht, in a 'free for all' society the poor, the vast majority of the population, can only survive by (organized) begging and stealing, by dirty works ('Missetat'). After fighting one another, the crime bosses find a far better solution for the consolidation of their power. They make a super deal, pool their resources and create a financial syndicate of criminals, in other words, a bank, with the former corrupt police chief as CEO. What an awesome prophetic idea! With brilliant theatrical histrionics and a perfect 'London' atmosphere, G.W. Pabst shot an ageless movie masterpiece based on an everlasting opera. A must see.

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.

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.

In the last few years before Nazi power overtook the German film industry, Kurt Weill's operetta reached the screen in this effective and well-cast version. Notable for including Lotte Lenya (Weill's wife) as Jenny, it is funny, memorable, imaginatively filmed, and despite the language barrier, does justice to the songs enshrined in popular culture such as ‘Mack the Knife'.

A giant of early European talkies, this musical has much to recommend to a viewer looking at it after seven decades. An adaptation with songs of John Gay's ‘The Beggar's Opera', it deals with the underworld of crooks, moneylenders, and cut-throats.

Chief of note in the varied cast are Rudolf Forster as Mackie, Carola Neher as Polly, Fritz Rasp as Peachum, and Ernst Busch as the Street Singer. This movie is one of bitterness and foreboding, and it is excellent.

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.