MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Mack’: A ‘Threepenny Opera’ Remake Betrays Weill, Brecht

When Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill wrote “The Threepenny Opera” in 1928, they wanted to annihilate the conventions of German light opera, if not of contemporary society itself.

Taking as their source John Gay’s 1728 “The Beggar’s Opera”--with its cast of beggars, cutthroats, crooked police and its dashing highwayman Macheath--they held a distorted mirror up to the Weimar Germany of their day: its corruptions and hypocrisies, its mendacity and greed. Astonishingly, they made the public love their assault. This great, fierce play was a smash hit, not only in Germany, but across Europe.

Menahem Golan, who adapted and directed a new film version called “Mack the Knife” (selected theaters), undoubtedly has less subversive goals. He wants to bring a great classic to the screen, fill it with the best talent or biggest names, dress it in fine trimmings and bring a new generation to its idealistic themes: its attacks on conformity, corruption and war. Golan’s goals are laudable, but misguided. He’s like the man who wants to bring a gorgeous tart to a fancy dress ball and, swathing her in silks and stays, masks her dangerous allure.

Golan’s “Mack the Knife”--ironically, more faithful to its source than the celebrated G.W. Pabst film of 1931--sinks Brecht and Weill, their evil humor and haunting, jaggedly dissonant songs, into a vast gooey fruitcake of star-turns, opulent sets and creamy, lush orchestrations. Golan’s designers set the film not in 18th-Century England or ‘20s Berlin, but in Victorian England, the time of Dickens. Maybe that keys their intentions. They seem to be aiming less for the spirit of Brecht and Weill and more for Lionel Bart and Carol Reed in the movie “Oliver!” Indeed, one of “Oliver!’s” first Fagins, Clive Revill, is on hand here as Money Matthew.

This is a friendlier, twinklier “Threepenny Opera,” with Roger Daltrey as a beaming, grinning Street Singer, selling himself to the audience; Rachel Robertson (from the Levi’s jeans TV ads) as a bouncy, pretty Polly, and Richard Harris and Julie Walters playing the Peachums--the nefarious beggar overlords of London--as a lovable, dissolute old rogue and his comical shrew of a wife.

The movie--with its vast set, honeycombed with alleys, its carriage chases, sword fights and hundreds of extras milling around--is a determinedly extroverted production. But it lacks a dark, sardonic edge: the prime ingredient of Brecht’s dramaturgy and Weill’s music. Golan leaches much of the acid out of the tale--and leaves his cast tiptoeing and prancing through famous goo.

Lost among them is Raul Julia, famous for his stage Macheath in the Joseph Papp revival, who repeats the role here. Julia can be a great movie actor, but his heart and knife doesn’t seem to be in this Mack. Playing this murderous Casanova and rogue, Julia’s motor seems to be idling. Peeking over at the jolly crew around him, jostling each other for the spotlight, who can blame him?

Julia comes across strong in his big number “The Cannon Song”--the same number that stopped the show and won over the crowd on “Threepenny Opera’s” first night on Aug. 28, 1928. But he’s up against another obstacle: the peculiar casting of Bill Nighy as Police Chief Tiger Brown. Nighy, a tall, slender blonde, looks more like Daltrey’s understudy than a London or Berlin police chief. And, when Julia sings with the 16-year-old Robertson, he seems to get more bemused, like some weary Humbert Humbert shoved on stage with the wrong Lolita.

Julia Migenes, Francesco Rosi’s “Carmen,” plays Ginny Jenny, and though she certainly sends chills up spines singing Lotte Lenya’s old number, “Pirate Jenny,” it’s more dubious casting. Would a prostitute who looked like this stunning, bosomy beauty be hanging out in a brothel dive? The blunt-jawed, fierce-eyed Lenya could look believably insulted and injured. When Migenes fantasizes about destroying persecutors, she seems petulant or even psychotic. It’s not necessarily bad to cast, or even miscast, big stars, but, here, there’s no alternate reality to hide the anachronism. We keep getting jerked out of the play--and not in the ways Brecht intended.

At the end, Golan pulls back from the stage and reveals a huge, ornate London theater with a rapt, and extremely well-dressed, audience, all but yelling “Bravo!” Is this Brechtian detachment or self-congratulation? Or a cue that we should be yelling “Bravo!” too?

Lovers of Brecht and Weill may dismiss “Mack the Knife” (rated PG-13) as a botch. Yet it’s not a waste of time. The music is there, the words--some of them Marc Blitzstein’s--are there, and once in a while someone, usually Julia, takes hold of them. But an essential element of “Threepenny Opera” is a certain nastiness, a tough mockery, a lack of willingness to be seduced by romance or money. This one winks and flirts and desperately wants applause. It doesn’t have the nerve to tell its audience to get stuffed--and make them love it.