The Nazisı objections to the film had a far more drastic effect. Rankled by its socialist message and attacks on governmental authority (even though The 3 Penny Opera is set in Victorian England, its rele- vance to the political and social cli- mate in Germany at the time was hard to miss), the German censors (Hitlerıs ³Propaganda Office²) des- troyed the original negative and every print they could lay their hands on. The filmıs unavailability bolstered its legendary status: in 1948 a film criticsı colloquium held in Brussels voted it one of the ten greatest films of all time. Finally, Thomas Brandon, a pioneer of art film distribution in the U.S., spent the better part of the Fifties scour- ing Europe for prints of the film in an effort to reconstruct it. With the aid of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this seemingly impos- sible task was accomplished, and the restored version was released in 1960.

Brechtıs play, Die Drei- groschenoper, is, of course, derived from John Gayıs The Beggarıs Opera (1728), itself a sort of bur- lesque of Italian opera. Gayıs popu- list satire on English jurisprudence and the Walpole administration was reworked by Brecht into a wide-ranging comic indictment of class structure and the institution of prosperity. But the same bourgeois society that Brecht sought to lam- poon made his play a triumph; when it opened in Berlin in 1928 ³The Threepenny Opera² was an immediate sensation, and its enor- mous popularity ever since is also testimony to the brilliance of Kurt Weillıs music. It was undoubtedly the box of- fice success of the stage production, more so than the originality and dramatic inventiveness of the play itself, which led to its screen adap- tation, a paradoxical event in that it brought together two creative forces as diametrically opposed in their artistic approach as Brecht and G.W. Pabst, the filmıs director.

When he undertook the filming of The 3 Penny Opera, in 1930, Pabst was generally regarded, along with Murnau and Lang, as one of the three masters of German Expressionist cinema, having won acclaim for such films as The Joyless Street, The Love of Jeanne Ney, Pandoraıs Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. He left Germany in 1933, im- mediately after Hitlerıs rise to power, but his decision to return there and make films under the Third Reich badly damaged his rep- utation, and he might be nearly forgotten today, were it not for the enduring Louise Brooks cult.

But even the praise of Pabst by his contemporaries, focusing too narrowly on his skill at depicting venality and perversion, does not do justice to the scope of his talent. With his psychological acuity and visual mastery of the medium, Pabst was able, especially in his sil- ent films, to free his images from a restricting servitude to narrative, making his knowing, dark contem- plation more the subject of his films than the things contemplated.

Brecht, on the other hand, was a social satirist and a man of the theater. His work had grown in- creasingly radical in the years be- fore he teamed up with Kurt Weill; their first collaborative effort, ³Mahagonny² (1927), reflected his newly developed concepts of ³Didactic Theater.² When they col- laborated a second time, on ³The Threepenny Opera,² one can imagine that what interested the two authors most in the original John Gay material was not so much its picaresque story and characters, nor even its keen observation and wry wit, but the possibility of modernizing and manipulating its ele- ments into a vast social parable, through which their political and artistic theories could find expression.

The plot of the films varies somewhat from the play (some of these variations having been initi- ated and written by Brecht himself), but essentially retains the storyline that served both Brecht and Gay so well, involving the charismatic Macheath known as ³Mack the Knife²‹and the complications which arise when he weds Polly Peachum, the daughter of ³Londonıs Beggar King,² a sort of pimp for the destitute. The ³happy ending² does not obscure the scathing cynicism of the moral that whores and hoodlums have a lot in common with policemen, bankers and other pillars of society, and that an ad- versary can sometimes make a good business partner‹at the expense, of course, of the poor.

The credits of The 3 Penny Opera are full of illustrious names: Brecht, Weill, Pabst; the great Lotte Lenya, who originated her role of ³Jenny² on stage; Rudolf Forster and Carola Neher as Macheath and Polly; Pabst regulars Fritz Rasp and Valeska Gert as Peachum and his wife. However, one cannot overlook the contributions made by cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner and art director Andrei Andreiev, whose stylized depiction of the turn-of- the-century London underworld haunts oneı s memory of the film.

Although reviewers have sometimes criticized the directorıs ³romanticising² of Brechtıs mater- ial, film historians have recognized The 3 Penny Opera as one of the last great works of German cinemaıs richest period. They also recognize that Pabstıs vision lends humanity and depth to the material,without diminishing Brechtıs message or his mordant wit‹the authorıs ideas of social reality are imbued with Pabstıs characteristic darker shadings and emotions; his feelings of psycholog- ical reality. ‹ANNELIESE VARALDIEV

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