The world of 1900 London is filtered through the cynical world-view of Berlin in the late 1920s to become an intoxicating cultural brew. Fritz Arno Wagner's camera takes us to the quayside where a Street Singer (Ernst Busch) relates the bloody crimes of the infamous Mackie Messer. The gangster is standing right there, happily listening to the account of his rapes and murders. G. W. Pabst's moving camera roams through wonderful dusty-gray crooked streets and smoky beer halls, where we meet the foolish women and clumsy thieves of Mackie's world. Mackie sees no need to panic when he hears that a manhunt has been called for him. He goes straight to the brothel to think about his problem.

The songs of The Threepenny Opera are sly, melodic and powerful. Polly Peachum stands in her wedding dress and explains why she's turned down a score of decent suitors to instead favor the thoroughly rotten Mackie. The frustrated Jenny Diver squares her shoulders and imagines herself a lady pirate, taking out her hatred on the world by slaughtering a whole town. When Tiger Brown comes back to Mackie to return the crook's purloined bail money, Mackie is inspired to share a jolly song about the bloody adventures they had in India, indiscriminately killing natives whether white or colored. And the Street Singer returns periodically with melancholy reprises expressing the hopelessness of life in the city's underbelly, where the only way one can live is to exploit one's fellow man. The Threepenny Opera ends similarly to Pabst's silent Pandora's Box, with defeated figures disappearing into the darkness of the London streets. The Street Singer's final words lament the little people whose miseries no one hears.

Rudolf Forster is appropriately cold and imperious as Mackie Messer, the cock 'o the walk in Soho. We see him give the cops the slip but no violent crimes happen on screen. Beautiful Carola Neher has a stunning voice; finally hearing and seeing her sing clearly is like jumping into a time machine to a lost civilization, before Hitler wiped out a generation's worth of German creativity. The biggest attraction is the secondary female lead Jenny Diver. As played by Lotte Lenya, 'Pirate Jenny' is simply stunning, a bundle of raw talent and unstoppable energy. Lenya was from a frighteningly rough background, and she projects so much life through her face and body that she makes herself beautiful by sheer will power.

Favorite actor Vladimir Sokoloff (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Magnificent Seven) has a nice bit as a prison guard, looking much younger than we're used to seeing him.

As noted above, Criterion's DVD of The Threepenny Opera is a wonder of restoration; it is no longer necessary to squint beyond an unstable image and indecipherable audio to imagine what an original screening might have been like. Producer Issa Clubb leads off the extras with an authoritative commentary by scholars David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler and a new minidocu explains the basic story of the transformation of play into movie. Fritz Rasp and Ernst Busch appear in an East German prologue for a late-1940s reissue, where the scripted patter has them stress the film's harmony with Communist ideals.

A second disc contains an entire second feature, the French version L'opera de quat'sous directed simultaneously by Pabst on the same sets and with some of the same actors. The leads look more like conventional musical comedy stars and the actress playing Lotte Lenya's role hasn't a tenth of the impact. But the direction is almost identical and the French translations of the songs are very interesting. The print quality isn't as beautiful as the German version, but it isn't bad either. Film scholar Charles O'Brien contributes a feature comparison of the two versions. An elderly Fritz Rasp appears again to talk about his entire career in film, including his work with Fritz Lang. Galleries of art designs and stills from both film versions are included. The insert booklet essay by Tony Rayns is informative and entertaining, and explains the sometimes-contradictory Bertolt Brecht in terms we can better understand.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Threepenny Opera rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: see above
Packaging: two discs in Keep case
Reviewed: September 22, 2007