Next up? The Beggar's Opera Another movie I haven't seen. It sounds great. Peter Brook is a wonder.
The Beggar's Opera 1953
Pure pleasure -- the ballad-opera about the highwayman Captain Macheath and his escapes from the law and the ladies, with Laurence Olivier doing his own singing (he has a pleasant light baritone) as the dashing Macheath. This is one of his most playful, sophisticated, and least-known roles. It was Swift who suggested that a "Newgate pastoral might make an odd pretty sort of thing," and John Gay worked out the idea in a new form -- a musical play with the lyrics fitted to existing music. To Londoners weary of the bombast of Italian opera, Gay's corrupt gang of thieves, highwaymen, whores, and informers was the fresh, sweet breath of England. Gay satirized the politics of the day as well as the heroics of Italian opera; many of his targets are now a matter for historians, but the large butt of the joke -- the corruption and hypocrisy of mankind -- still sits around. And by the time Peter Brook directed this film (his first, and the only comedy he has ever made), a new set of conventions, as tired and inflated as Italian opera, was ready for potshots -- the conventions of the movies: the chaste heroines, the intrepid Robin Hood heroes, the phony realism. Dennis Cannan and Christopher Fry adapted the text freely, retaining the mocking, raffish spirit, and Arthur Bliss arranged the score so that we come out humming the pretty airs. And the actors are having such a good time playing scoundrels that their zest for villainy is infectiously satiric. Stanley Holloway is a magnificent Lockit, and shows off his fine, deep voice. Most of the others are dubbed, but they perform in such an offhand manner that the dubbing is inoffensive. It even comes in for a bit of parody when Dorothy Tutin, as dear Polly Peachum, sings while rowing a boat. She obviously isn't singing the way someone rowing would sing; she smiles like a cat who has swallowed a canary, as indeed she has. Commercially, the film was a disaster, and it has rarely been revived.Posted by sheila