Even though it occasioned Brecht's "Threepenny Lawsuit" (he settled for damages), Pabst's film is an important one, retaining many Brechtian elements from the original play (if not Brecht's ideas for the cinema) and some of the songs by Kurt Weill. Featuring legendary performances by Lotte Lenya and Rudolph Forster, it remains a classic of left-wing cinema of the period in its ironic commentary on the underworld character of bourgeois social relations. The film survived the attempts by the Nazis to destroy all copies. British critic Tony Rayns wrote, "If the director has subverted the play's subversiveness, it is to the end of a poetic anarchy, irrational, beautiful, and precise, where surrealism, expressionism, and Marxism find a remarkable-if fleeting-common ground."