THE THREEPENNY OPERA (73)

Directed by: G.W. Pabst (1931)

Starring: Rudolf Forster, Lotte Lenya, Ernest Busch, Fritz Rasp

The Pitch: In Victorian London, womanising gentleman thief Mack the Knife courts the daughter of the Beggar King and tries to stay one step ahead of the law.

Theo Sez: Brecht apparently sued for misinterpretation, but this version of his and Kurt Weill's stage show must surely have found heavy resonance with Weimar Republic audiences - in its vision of a society that's corrupt from top to bottom (prisoners pay wardens from 1 to 10 guineas for lighter handcuffs, with a 50-guinea special for no handcuffs at all), crooks and bankers interchangeable, a dog-eat-dog world where the natural state of Man is to live by "tormenting, fleecing, attacking, throttling and devouring his fellows", above all in its call for the poor to rise up and bring the middle classes face-to-face with the misery they've caused, and Jenny the prostitute's dream of revenge against all who belittle her (a scene both chilling and luscious, Lenya singing coolly and impassively while Forster watches with a smile, his face wreathed in cigarette smoke). The famous score is sadly truncated, though "Mack the Knife" and "The Cannon Song" are present and correct (the latter a reminder that the film's hard, cynical milieu - 20s Berlin in all but name - stems from WW1 suffering and humiliation) ; more damagingly, the army-of-beggars climax - and generally the final act - is fumbled, lost in a welter of sub-plots, meaning the film doesn't really work as a narrative, more as a musical (the songs are all wonderful) and of course a sensory experience of deliberately oppressive excess - Mack's in jail long before the cops catch up to him, trapped in bric-a-brac, stylised sets and shadowy visuals. Musical numbers are the highlights, but the mordant sense of humour is surprisingly modern ("They said they were over thirty!" protests Mack, charged with corrupting a pair of sisters ; "Put together," sighs Polly waspishly) and the view of an amoral netherworld still shocks in the depth and completeness of its despair. That it was banned in London after a single showing makes perfect sense ; that Hitler also suppressed it - ordering all prints destroyed - despite the accuracy with which it evokes the conditions that brought him to power, is more surprising.