The Threepenny Opera

Even though it occasioned Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Lawsuit” (he settled for damages), G. W. Pabst’s film is an important one, retaining many Brechtian elements from the original play and some of Kurt Weill’s songs. Featuring legendary performances by Lotte Lenya and Rudolf Forster, it remains a classic of leftist cinema in its ironic commentary on the character of bourgeois social relations. The film survived Nazi attempts to destroy all copies. If Pabst has “subverted the play’s subversiveness, it is to the end of a poetic anarchy, irrational, beautiful, and precise [place], where surrealism, expressionism, and Marxism find a remarkable—if fleeting-common ground” (Tony Rayns).