L'opéra des gueux

This was a very enjoyable movie especially if you like period pieces and/or musicals. Hearing Laurence Olivier sing is reason enough to watch this. The cinematography is outstanding and the movie as a whole is very colorful.

Obviously, the song "Mack the Knife" made famous by Bobby Darin, Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra is based on this opera/movie. MacHeath is in the opera/movie as is Jenny Diver and Sukey Tawdrey. Louie Miller, Lotte Lenya and Lucy Brown are mentioned in the song (and not in the opera/movie) but, after all, MacHeath was a notorious highwayman and ladies' man.

While this is an adequate rendering of the famous John Gay mock opera, it suffers from having Olivier sing the entire role in his own untrained voice. After a while his vocalism grows wearisome, having a slight flat and dull quality to his tone.

Brook's direction is also lacking; in trying to open the action up on screen, it looks somewhat forced and off balance. This is still a good film, all things considered and the fact that it's a rare filming of this work.

So in the end we give it a grade of B, and hope a better version will subsequently be made.

Sir Laurence Olivier expressed a great deal of disappointment with the way The Beggar's Opera finally turned out. On reflection he probably would have done it as a straight dramatic play. Certainly the role of the swaggering outlaw Captain Macheath would seem to be a choice part.

Olivier had sung before on screen, in Fire Over England he warbled an old English ditty There Was a Spanish Lady Who Wooed an English Man and did very well by it in his portrayal of Michael Ingolby in that film. But the problem is that in Fire Over England he was the only one singing. Later on he did very well in The Entertainer as song and dance man Archie Rice. But in The Beggar's Opera his voice suffers by comparison to the trained voices that were dubbed for all the other players except Olivier and Stanley Holloway.

I guess producer Herbert Wilcox felt he couldn't dub voices as known as Olivier and Holloway. But Holloway was a musical performer so he didn't suffer by comparison.

The Beggar's Opera has been argued to be the first musical play done in the English language. John Gay wrote the book and lyrics and the music is taken from old English tunes and arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It's a satire of the corrupt and bawdy age of Robert Walpole, King George I's Prime Minister and the first person to be actually called by that title.

The Age of Walpole began with the end of War of Spanish Succession and the death of Queen Anne and the Hanover succession secured. Robert Walpole had some very simple ideas on what was best for the United Kingdom. Everybody make money, eat, drink and be merry, secure good trade deals and keep out of war at all costs. You could buy anything during his time, including honor and justice. Merchant Peachum played by George Devine is a caricature of Walpole. A most greedy man who'll do anything for a pound.

Macheath knows the people he's dealing and he does it on their own terms. He gets arrested for rewards, he buys a reprieve. It really did work that way back in Walpole's time.

And he's romancing two women, Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit although the women use him as much as he uses them. Lucy's dad is Stanley Holloway the jailkeeper who's not above a bribe or two from prisoners able to pay.

The Beggar's Opera got a Teutonic remake when Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht did The Threepenny Opera in the last century and the immortal Mack the Knife comes from it.

Still if The Beggar's Opera was to be done in its original form, wouldn't it have been far better to have a group like the D'Oyly Carte Light Opera Company who do so well with Gilbert and Sullivan do this instead of straight players who have to be dubbed?

The sad fact about "The Beggar's Opera" is that it wasn't directed by Powell and Pressburger. If this had been the case it would no doubt be lauded today as an eccentric masterpiece. It shared the same fate of critical disdain in its time as "Gone to Earth" and "The Elusive Pimpernel" but, unlike these, has still to await an appreciative resurrection. Could it be that it was made by the comparatively little known Peter Brook! And yet with its colourful visual flair and sometimes breathtaking sense of movement it seems right out of the same stable as "The Tales of Hoffmann" and "Oh Rosalinda!". A wonderfully imaginative shot of the landscape viewed from the scaffold gradually blacked out as the prisoner's blindfold is lowered over MacHeath's eyes is perhaps the best example of its inventiveness. For the musical purist it is inevitably something of a curiosity. A fine cast of contemporary singers including Adele Leigh, Jennifer Vyvyan and Edith Coates were assembled to dub the acting cast for the musical numbers, whereas the main role of MacHeath was sung by Laurence Oliver himself, his light baritone voice, although no match for the others, at least serviceable. But, as it works perfectly well, why quibble. (I have little time for those who criticised the "amateur" voices of Woody Allen's delicious musical "Everyone Says I Love You" as they so matched the characters and were not in the least, as has been suggested, unmusical). I watched "The Beggar's Opera" again the other day after a gap of over 50 years and found it just as refreshing. One of the reasons is that many of the tunes are terrific and not one of them goes on for too long. Generally I have to confess that I have little time for filmed musicals. I invariably want the songs to be got over as quickly as possible in order to get on with the action, which I know completely misses the point. With "The Beggar's Opera" I find the reverse to be true, just about resisting the temptation to fast-forward the dialogue to get to the next "tune". Sir Arthur Bliss did a wonderful job of arranging the music specially for the film version although it has to be admitted that the sound quality of the copy transmitted on Sky's Artsworld channel was often muddy and unclear. Would that the soundtrack could be remastered!

When this movie opened it scarcely caused a ripple in Britain and even less so in the U.S. I don't know why. It's a telling of John Gay's great work written in 1728, and the play was a blockbuster 280 years ago. It's supposed to be the first English "opera" that told a story through song and which was aimed to entertain the people. Gay took melodies wherever he found them, wrote lyrics to them to advance the storyline, and had a hit. And in another version, it still is. The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (with Blitzstein's redone lyrics) is a fixture in theaters, and Mack the Knife is still a popular song.

Lawrence Olivier plays Macheath, a rollicking highwayman with "wives" all over London. He has two in particular, Polly Peachum, the daughter of his fence, and Lucy Lockit, the daughter of his jailer. The story of Macheath's adventures, captures and escapes are all told in song. There are horse riding songs, love songs, gambling songs, longing songs, lustful songs. The story starts in a London prison where Macheath awaits hanging. A beggar just tossed into the prison has written an opera about Macheath. He starts to tell it to the inmates and the movie takes off.

The songs are great fun and the style of the movie is very much the look of 18th century London. You can feel the fleas in the wigs, the lice in the clothes, the sheen of greasy lips, the stink of unwashed bodies.

And there are some sharp lines. "A miser might as well be satisfied with one guinea as I with one wife." "Love is a misfortune that can happen even to an indiscreet girl." "I can tell by your kiss that your gin is excellent." And when pointing out that consummation needn't wait for marriage, "Friends should not insist on ceremony."

Olivier does a masterful job, handling his own stunts, horse work and, most bravely, his own singing. He's good. On the day of Macheath's hanging, he's carted out to the gallows, sitting jauntily on his casket. While a grim-faced preacher is screaming at him to repent, he's sweeping up wenches to kiss, downing tankards of ale held up to him, and making a little girl laugh while bouncing her on his knee. Olivier plays it with great verve.

And while there's not exactly a reprieve, there is a joyous escape.

If you like Olivier, if you like things British, if you like quirky films that will probably be forgotten, this is worth seeing.