Will the Shark Bite?
G. W. Pabst and The Threepenny Opera
"Macheath: I'm not asking you to put on an opera."
~ Bertolt Brecht, The
Threepenny Opera, Act 1, scene 2
Down the crooked lanes of London, gangster Mackie Messer stalks a new inamorata, Polly
Peachum, and Pabst's camera strolls along with him. Encountering the hurdy-gurdy strains of the
"Moritat," or, "Ballad of Mack the Knife," Mackie insinuates himself into the crowd, next to Polly, and
listens to the promulgation of his own myth. Against the background of the street singer cataloging his
misdeeds — most of them involving the rape and/or murder of women — Polly's seduction begins.
Fusing music and image, it's a virtuosic display, and Pabst's not done. When Mackie
offers drinks to Polly and Frau Peachum at a nearby dance hall, they enter a dingy den of vice full of
smoke and the pounding rhythms of piano and drums, to which the dancing patrons add the percussion of
shoes and boot heels. The honky-tonk music is all by Kurt Weill, taken from tunes that were sung in the
original stage version of Threepenny Opera of 1928. The smoky, drunken ambience combined with the
din of the dancing — an unusually visceral use of sound for an early talkie — is a feast for
the senses.
Unveiled by Criterion's splendid new DVD edition, these opening minutes of Pabst's film
are so exhilaratingly good, I wondered why, as the film proceeded and came to an end, I felt
unsatisfied.
Turns out, less than half of Weill's score is heard in Pabst's 1931 film. Some important
songs are relegated to source music as in the example above, where the bar's patrons dance to the tune
"The Song About Inadequacy," which is never heard in its vocal form. Many songs are heard not at all,
and this is part of the rub.
1 The Brecht/Weill conception contained a lot of music, which,
separated from Brecht's (
right) dialog, runs a little over an hour. Pabst apparently was wild to obtain the
rights to
Threepenny Opera, but he must have known all along that he'd have to jettison a lot of
its music, and, to make the movie he wanted, reimagine the entire piece. Narrative films, including
Pabst's, most often beg to be mistaken for reality; the Brecht/Weill show does not.
2
More an extended cabaret act than a cohesive narrative, the original theatrical
Threepenny Opera wears its artificiality on a tattered sleeve. There is a plot, based very
loosely on John Gay's 18th-century satire
The Beggar's Opera, but it's kept rather sketchy and
coarse, because every few minutes Brecht/Weill stops the action cold with another song. This unbuttoned
structure, combined with the salaciousness and half-written quality of the dialog, is a purposed affront
to the European operatic tradition then in place, exemplified in Germany by Wagner.
3 On the stage,
Threepenny Opera flips the bird at the unities of the
god/genius' sublime music dramas.
The whole show hangs together not by action or dialog, but by the harmonic and thematic
glue supplied by the score, which is anything
but haphazard. Weill even supplies a leitmotif in
the form of the recurring tune of the "Moritat"
4 that has the
perhaps unintentional effect of mocking Wagner further. More importantly, all of the songs share a
unique Threepenny "tint" both in their harmonic language and in their pit band, early jazz
orchestrations. One of the commentators on Criterion's new documentary,
Brecht vs. Pabst, guesses
that the Weimar audience came to the stage version of
Threepenny Opera for the songs;
furthermore, I'm betting, they ate up the sometimes naughty ironies supplied by the book's cynicism
without buying into Brecht's angry cry for social justice.
The songs of
Threepenny Opera aren't meant to advance the show's plot or to
dramatize its characters, which, as adapted from Gay's scenario,
5 are little more than signifiers; while singing, the stage performers project
"attitudes."
6 When a tune begins, a spotlight or lamp
appears, the actor steps into its light, does the number, then steps back to resume dialog —
spotlight out. Song lyrics are "frequently in quotation marks."
7 In the original stage version, this way of framing the songs, which are often
in archly orchestrated pop styles, creates an ironic disjoint, much like the kind Dennis Potter strives
for when his characters in
Pennies From Heaven, caught in degrading or deceitful poses, suddenly
start lip-synching to the shallow optimism or maudlin balladry of a popular song. The film manages only
a whiff of these ironies, localized mostly in the faux romance of Macheath and Polly that's set to the
flavorings of mock Viennese operetta. Like Gustav Mahler before him, Weill understood the power of
schmaltz.
For his adaptation, it seems Pabst couldn't find a dramatic alternative to the stage
work's juiced-up blend of cynical, nearly throwaway text and ebullient (but rather mournful) music.
8 After a while, with just a song here and there, the film loses
steam. Within his readjusted and tightly controlled narrative, Pabst pushes a more specific Marxist
polemic than the theater piece, and none of the performances — with one glorious exception —
seems able to step out from behind this moralizing scrim and truly evolve as a character.
Still, Rudolf Forster brings a menacing heft to his Macheath, and Ernst Busch is
perfection as the Street Singer (
right). Listen to the way Busch rolls his "r's" in the "Moritat," and you know
it's a long way to Bobby Darin. Busch's stylized way with the song gives us the tart idiomatic flavor of
the original show.
Tony Rayns, in his detailed essay in Criterion's booklet, cites Busch and Lotte Lenya as
the only two members of the original theatrical cast to make it into the movie; but there is a third,
Carola Neher, who plays Polly. Fine-boned and very pretty, Neher was chosen and rehearsed to create
Polly in 1928, but dropped out before the show's premiere for personal reasons; she rejoined the cast in
time for the show's "second
en suite" run in 1929.
9
Yet Neher's unfocused presence as an actress seems inadequate to Polly's new prominence in the film
version, and her high, thin soprano voice is not winningly captured by the early recording technology.
Then we have Lotte Lenya. With a large nose and the mother of all overbites, Lenya was
not a pretty or glamorous woman, but it's her presence, in a supporting role, that lifts the film for
moments at a time into another realm. The best of these moments is her performance of "Pirate Jenny," a
number that was originally assigned to Polly Peachum. Pabst's reassignment of the song proves
dramatically apt. In a pivotal scene, Jenny is about to betray Macheath because she's weary of being
relegated to the position of spare cunt. In this context, the song, with its violent imagery, is no
longer "dreams of a kitchen maid," but a prostitute's dream of revenge.
10 With no visible technique, Lenya projects the anger of the socially
downcast better than anything in the film. Jenny is tired, used up, but, carrying a spark of defiance in
her big, dark eyes, fully alive. Lenya, the wife/collaborator of composer Weill, was
intelligent, large in spirit, and knew how to sell a song. She was also uncommonly sexy.
In his entry for Pabst in his
New Biographical Dictionary of Film, film writer
David Thomson suggests that, in order to create truly great films, this filmmaker needed a collaborator,
and that, sadly, he found only one, Louise Brooks. Thomson quotes Lotte Eisner's view that Brooks had
"succeeded in stimulating an otherwise unequal director's talent to the extreme."
11 He and Brooks made just two films together, but I think Pabst could have
found yet another such collaborator in Lotte Lenya (
right). It was probably too late anyway; Lenya fled Germany
in 1933.
When Lenya is not present in the 1931 film, what's left to savor is some low comedy from
Mackie's stumblebum gang of thieves (Huntz Hall would not be out of place here), a nicely filmed
sequence where Macheath narrowly avoids the police while dallying at the Turnbridge whorehouse, and a
neat, rather dry denouement (taken from Brecht's treatment). In these scenes we feel less the bite of
Mackie's shark teeth than the smooth texture of his white kid gloves — although Pabst's final
image, matched to a potent line from the "Moritat,"
12 is
haunting in much the same way as the closing of
Pandora's Box,
where a clueless character follows the poor and homeless as they march into social oblivion with a
Salvation Army band. In
Threepenny Opera, however, the image of the poor being swallowed up by
darkness has a traditional narrative's closure about it and a literal, albeit quite moving, visual
translation of Brecht's more figurative text.
13 By making
his movie in a linear and closed form, Pabst has allied himself with those very same operatic/narrative
unities that Brecht/Weill chose to disrupt, but to me there's nothing sacred to the avant-gardism
(turned commercially successful) of the Brecht/Weill vision, a unique frisson that most likely must
forever be bound to its theatrical anti-theatricalism.
Yet one of the film's glories is its inclusion of three of the original members of that
original stage show, and Criterion's improved audio brings their forgotten vocal styles closer to us.
Criterion's new high-definition transfer,
14 from a restored
element in the German Bundesarchiv, is a window wiped clean, its clarity wondrous, its range of blacks
and middle values simply gorgeous. Pabst's skill and craftsmanship in filmmaking is fully revealed: in
sets and lighting design, his creation of a Victorian London is at once realistic and fantastical,
rendered in some of the richest chiaroscuro of the director's career. Some have said this pictorial
lushness dulls the edge of Brecht/Weill's conception even further, but the eye revels in it.
I just miss the songs.
Notes
1. To hear the score approximately as the 1928 audience
did, you can turn to a 1958 recording of the New York revival of the original show, supervised by Lotte
Lenya, who in turn sang Jenny. Interestingly, the recording, unlike the show's book, has the Street
Singer introduce each song, which creates a new, unified piece out of the isolated songs, a kind of jazz
oratorio. As far as I know this recording is still available as a single disc CD issue from Sony.
2. All films, of course, vary the level at which they
want to trick the audience with their illusions. Pabst ventures outside his narrative frame with one
very effective theatrical device: several times he has the Street Singer address the audience with
comments on the action. It's a bold transgression and prefigures everything from Albert Finney's asides
to the audience in Tom Jones (1963) to Joel Grey's turn as the master of ceremonies in
Cabaret (1972) (see also note 8, below).
3. Hinton, Stephen (editor). Kurt Weill: The
Threepenny Opera. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 140.
4. Ibid. p. 168.
5. The Beggar's Opera's satirical target was the
aristocracy; Brecht made his the bourgeoisie.
6. Hinton, Stephen, p 5.
7. Ibid. p. 6.
8. Bob Fosse, with his film adaptation of the stage
musical Cabaret, faced a similar dilemma: how to cinematically open up a theatrical conception
where many of the songs do not forward characterizations or plot. Fosse merely kept these "commentary"
songs and excised the rest. He presents the remaining songs, which play against the characters' personal
dilemmas within the emergence of National Socialism, in the artificial space of the Kit Kat Klub. From
here he can skillfully toggle back and forth to the film's linear story line in its real space.
9. Ibid. pp. 52, 57.
10. Like all of Weimar Berlin, Pabst can seem obsessed
with whoredom. Images of prostitutes were everywhere in twenties' German culture, high or low, in films,
paintings, novels, stage works, and nudie shows — and of course, most of all, on the streets.
Pabst's possible distinction was his compassion for them and their plight, but something in a whore's
victimhood probably turned him on, too.
11. Thomson, David. New Biographical Dictionary of
Film. Little Brown and Co., London, 2003, pp. 660-661.
12. Brecht added this stanza of the "Moritat" in his
rejected film treatment (Brecht, Bertolt. The Theepenny Opera, Arcade, New York, NY, 1994.
Translated and edited by Ralph Manheim and John Willett, p. 84 (notes and variations).
13. For the ones they are in darkness/And the others
are in light/And you see the ones in brightness/Those in darkness drop out of sight. (Translated by Guy
Stern)
14. The entire French version of Threepenny
Opera (right), filmed in tandem, scene by scene, with the German one, appears on a second disc, but its
inclusion is perhaps the perennial Criterion overkill. The comparison documentary by Charles O'Brien on
disc two ably demonstrates the differences between both versions, and that's enough for this viewer.
Other than the print being in lamentable shape, the French cast can't cut the mustard: the Macheath,
Robert Prejean, looks like he's auditioning for the Louis Jourdan role in Gigi.
