Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

timmy_501 GW Pabst's The 3 Penny Opera is ostensibly the story of a the conflict that arises when master burglar (and leader of a burglar guild) Mack the Knife marries Polly, the daughter of Peachum, the head of the guild of beggars. Though he prides himself in being the "Poorest man in London," Peachum is actually a very wealthy man who exploits the poor and and perpetuates their misery with his brutally efficient and dehumanizing industrial methods. Yet at the same time, Peachum deludes himself into thinking that he's a respectable man and this gives him a sort of bourgeois dislike for the more straightforward criminal activities of Mack the Knife and his cohorts. Almost from the beginning, however, it's clear that the film isn't really about romance or even a feud between rival guilds. Rather, this is a film about a deeply flawed society and the way it sustains itself. Pabst glosses over the romance between Mack and Polly while simultaneously emphasizing the artificiality of the proceedings, specifically with interludes from the type of narrator familiar from stage plays. This serves to accentuate the artificiality of the behavior of Peachum and police chief Tiger Brown, the two authority figures of the narrative, both who only pretend to have the best interests of the common people at heart. In reality, Tiger Brown is happy to pay his respects at obvious criminal Mack's wedding and easily cowed into doing the bidding of Peachum, who plans to use his army of poor beggars to embarrass the chief if he doesn't join Peachum's cause. At the same time, the burglar's guild uses their ill-gotten gains to purchase a bank with the implication that it's more efficient to rob people this way than by breaking into their homes. Beset on all sides with enemies, the poor are left with very little outlet and jump at the chance to strike out against their oppressors, though they fail to realize just how close those most responsible for their plight are and are thus led by Peachum and not against him. At the end they fail to make any progress and it seems things will continue as usual, with very little chance for the poor to better themselves. At the same time, their oppressors end the film with more solidarity than ever. Pabst is more than equal to his task as director here and he manages to create some striking images, particularly when he pulls into artfully composed close-ups of individuals or small groups, as when Peachum masterfully stirs up his followers or helplessly attempts to stem their tide. Further, he's clever enough to use the fact that this is adapted from a stage play to his advantage as turns the artificiality to his own purposes. In his use of artificiality to suggest the deterministic nature of industrial society, the film reminds me of Joe Wright's recent adaptation of Anna Karenina, though this film is a bit more subtle and much less stylistically over the top.

chaos-rampant 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.

MartinHafer While I adore foreign films and don't at all mind reading the subtitles, I must say that you lose quite a bit when you watch a musical in another language. So, while I score it with a very respectable 7, someone watching it in their own language would probably like it a lot more and might score it higher. This isn't a criticism--more just a fact about watching most foreign language musicals--particularly one with rather old fashioned styles of songs.If you aren't familiar with Berthold Brecht's "Three Penny Opera", it's a musical set in the worst parts of London and is all about the low-lifes living there at the time of the Coronation (1901). The 'star' is the dangerous Mack the Knife--a cut-throat who has a reputation for the ladies and for his enemies somehow disappearing...for good. However, this toughie makes the mistake of thinking he can marry the daughter of the King of the Beggars--a very powerful foe who has decided that Mack's temerity deserves death. Will Mackie manage to survive or will the King manage to get rid of his new son-in-law? Tune in if you are interested.Apparently the Nazis did not appreciate the play nor the playwright nor the guy who orchestrated the play/film (Kurt Weill). While the film makes the British look pretty bad (considering they all seem to either be cops on the take, pimps, thieves and the like), Brecht was a leftist and these leanings are occasionally obvious in the film (such as when the beggars approach the new queen). As for Weill, he was a Jew--and that alone was reason for the film being banned.As for me, I appreciated the look of the film most of all. Veteran director G. W. Pabst did a nice job at the helm and the film looked very nice--with lovely sets and nice cinematography. The acting was also good, though I am not sure if the thin singing was due to the actors or just primitive sound technology. As for the songs, they are most likely an acquired taste. For me, they seemed too short and lacked the nice harmony of, say a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. This isn't to say the songs are bad--just a style that threw me a little--much of it because it was like a musical with very, very little music. All in all, entertaining and worth seeing.By the way, the character Jennny (Lotte Lenya) was played by the same lady who three decades later played the incredibly scary agent Klebb in "From Russia With Love". Also, Vladimir Sokoloff (a familiar face in Hollywood) played the jailer just before he fled the new Nazi regime.Also, by the way, because I am a history teacher, I was confused a bit by the coronation aspect of the film. They never talked about the King (Edward VII) but talked about the Queen being crowned. This didn't make sense to me, as Alexandra was not their sovereign--just the reigning King's wife. In other words, the person being crowned was Edward, not his Queen.And finally, if you find the Criterion DVD, it has a great special feature--the French language version made simultaneously by Pabst--using a different cast but it's essentially the same film. This may seem strange, but at the time they didn't know how to dub films in multiple languages and even Hollywood was making alternate language versions of its films. A few examples include a Spanish version of "Dracula" (1931) with the exact same sets but Mexican actors. Also, Laurel & Hardy were such huge international stars that Hal Roach Studios made French, German, Italian and Spanish films--with Stan and Ollie phonetically delivering their lines to speakers of that language (as well as some appearances by American supporting actors like James Finlayson).

Claudio Carvalho 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")