Three Penny Opera,The

COLOR. With CURT JURGENS, HILDEGARDE NEFF, GERT FROBE, JUNE RITCHIE, LINO VENTURA and SAMMY DAVIS, JR. From the play by BERTOLT BRECHT and KURT WEILL. "Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear. And he shows them pearly white. Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear. And he keeps it out of sight." Brecht and Weills immortal musical drama, brought to the screen for the first time in color. Macheath (also known as Mack the Knife), the most notorious criminal and ladies man in Victorian London, presides over an exciting world of thieves, murderers, beggars, prostitutes and corrupt officials. His gang has been operating without interference from the authorities: the police chief, Tiger Brown, is Macks old army buddy. But Mack carries things too far when he marries innocent Polly Peachum. Her father, the powerful head of a tightly-run, extremely prosperous organization of beggars, threatens that unless Brown hangs Mack, thousands of beggars, cripples and other social outcasts! will stage a riot and disrupt the Queens coronation. The hour of execution arrives and Mack ascends the gallows. But wait! Theres a pleasant surprise in store - one which serves as a clever parody of happy endings (Brechts intention) but which is still emotionally satisfying. So is the entire film. Its excellent cast is headed by Sammy Davis, Jr. as The Street Singer, who performs "Mack the Knife" and appears throughout to offer ironic songs and comments on the action. The film presents most of the plays songs, ranging from delicate romantic ballads to bawdy, exuberant songs, to devastatingly witty attacks on conventional morality and bourgeois hypocrisy. Rich in spectacle, poignant as well as humorous and sharp in its observations of society, this is grand musical entertainment - for the mind and the spirit. Dubbed or spoken in English, the print is splicey in spots. 100 minutes.

When will this masterpiece be filmed well?

I only watched this film once, but was very unimpressed. When you read the discription, it says the editing is "splicey". Well, that's not the half of it. I had the impression, that this was perhaps a german TV production, with SAMMY DAVIS JR. slapped on the dubbed international version. Sammy sings his bits over frozen frames of the film. (the editing is VERY jumpy at these points.) Now, if you have seen this on stage, you know that the street singer who sings MACK THE KNIFE, isn't a schmucky Las Vegas act, but an organ grinder of the lower classes, who provides an ersatz greek chorus for the plot. The style of Kurt Weil's orchestration isnt "Lounge Jazz", it's an avant-guarde, complex score, that builds over relativly simple melodies, and german cabaret settings. Stylistically, the music in this film JUMPS like the editing. (not to mention poor sound quality overall.)I was furious, that many of my favorite songs were NOT in this film. To cut only ONE SONG, is too many. If you're aware of the 1930s Pabst version, he chose to cut out much of the lyrical content, but left in much of the music. I suppose that was because so many songs deal with prostitution, syndicated crime, religous hypocrasy, poverty, and anti-capitalism, so that the film would have been banned. (At least with the Pabst version, it has that gritty B&W, down and dirty vibe. Pabst has the off color songs as backround music, to get around the lyrics.) Honestly, I wouldnt sit thru this 1963 version again. The dubbing was terrible, as was the overall quality of the film. I am willing to bet, that this film simply capitalized on the wildly successful Broadway version of THREE PENNY OPERA from the late 50s early 60s, along with Bobby Darrin's hit version of MACK THE KNIFE. So, some producer, instead of making a large budget version based on the Broadway production, with Lotte Lenya, just took this German version, edited in Sammy Davis Jr., did a quicky dub on it, and brought it out to the public. I cannot believe that either Brecht or Weil would have approved this farce.
Personally, I think its a travisty that the 1978 Shakespeare Company version, with Raul Julio as MACK, wasnt filmed. Right now Bandauer is producing a version in Berlin, with the lead singer from DIE TOTEN HOSEN (a very famous german punk band) as Mackie.
This great masterpiece of musical theater deserves to be PROPERLY and COMPLETELY translated to the screen, if only as a filmed stage show. It would be doing serious music, and musical theater a great service. The possiblities of a fantastic film WITH THE COMPLETE SCORE is obvious, tho barely touched upon by Pabst's version back in the 30s. Anyway, I might rent this version, but I'd never lay out the money to buy it, unless you saw it and knew what you were getting. August 18, 2006

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