The Threepenny Opera (1931, G.W. Pabst) (Patreon)

49/100

Not a blue-ribbon adaptation, yuk yuk yuk. Pabst retains Brecht's basic narrative but reorders many events (40 minutes of the film elapse before we even learn who Polly Peachum is and why Mack marrying her is a problem) and radically alters others, eliding pretty much everything that could be termed Brechtian in the process. The ending, in particular, no longer works at all—instead of mercy via authorial fiat (a prematurely postmodern flourish that I only just now realized may have inspired Lubitsch's similar ending for One Hour With You), we get "The Cannon Song," which I was happy to hear, because I love it (even/especially Stan Ridgway's rendition; that album was my intro to Weill, way back in the '80s), but is an early context-establishing number that makes absolutely zero sense as the story's conclusion. I'm not someone who always demands fidelity to the source (cf. Under the Skin), but if you're gonna make significant changes, those changes should be creative rather than baffling; Pabst prioritizes impressively dank atmosphere over coherence, and I don't see any particular reason why he couldn't have made an equally forbidding Threepenny Opera that functions as Brecht and Weill intended. Not enamored of Rudolf Forster's oddly unprepossessing interpretation of Mack the Knife, either, though preserving Lotte Lenya's Jenny for posterity outweighs any and all iffy casting choices. (I watched the German version, needless to add.) Fortunately, at least some of Weill's songs were left intact, and those are the undoubted highlights—"The Ballad of Mack the Knife," staged by Pabst with visual emphasis on the crowd and Mack's presence within it (which would be tough to pull off theatrically without isolating or spotlighting him—exactly what you don't want to do), kicks things off with great promise. I really don't know why he felt the need to amend and trim and shuffle things around to so little evident purpose.