Mack the Knife Reviews

MACK THE KNIFE, the new film version of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "The Threepenny Opera," could serve as a textbook example of why film producers generally don't direct. Menahem Golan, of the Cannon Films Golan-Globus production team, has taken what may be the greatest musical play of them all and made an unequivocal botch of it. For those unfamiliar with the play, the story goes something like this: at the time of Queen Victoria's coronation, the streets of London are infested with crime and licentiousness. Polly (Rachel Robertson), the daughter of the Peachums (Richard Harris and Julie Walters), has engaged herself to marry MacHeath (Raul Julia), the dread King of the Underworld. Her parents strenuously object to this and set about to plan the lawful entrapment of the elusive MacHeath. Besides Tiger Brown (Bill Nighy), the chief of police, who has a friendly, shared past with MacHeath, Mrs. Peachum enlists the help of his sometime inamorata, Jenny Diver (Julia Migenes), an unscrupulous whore. The net closes in on MacHeath with the revelation that he has also had marital relations with Brown's daughter, Lucy (Erin Donovan), and with a Chinese tart, Sukey Tawdry (Dong Ji Hong). The noose is just about to tighten around his neck when a highly Brechtian turn of events saves the day. The film's production is visually dead--a murky blight seems to have permanently settled over the lens--with interpolated surrealistic and dream effects that are downright tacky. It's nearly impossible to enjoy Kurt Weill's acrid, seductive music as a compensation for the lack of exciting images, however, given the Las Vegas/Percy Faith arrangements of the truncated score. Golan has chosen to set his production in a set that looks like a leftover from a bus-and-truck OLIVER, and indeed, the whole film seems infected more with the spirit of Dickens than that of Brecht--whose original, bitter, and ruefully humorous commentary on social hypocrisy and injustice has been converted into rambunctious jollity, a mere excuse for the cast to dance about in the streets with an ain't-the-low-life-grand insouciance. (The choreography is nightmarishly bad, though luckily obscured by the MTV-ish editing.) In a miserable attempt to open things up (as well as to provide the now-requisite chase scene), director-screenwriter Golan even includes a madcap, Keystone Kops pursuit of MacHeath towards the finale that only manages to add insult to injury. The famous ending is utterly devoid of wit or surprise, leaving the actors rather pitiably stranded. The entire thing comes off about on the level of a high-school production--one hopes the actors' parents, at least, will enjoy it. Some of them may not, however, since the performances vary wildly in conception and execution. The one who emerges from the farrago with the most honor is Roger Daltrey--who, though a bit too Cockney as the Street Singer, displays an easy professionalism and charm, while managing not to be too jarringly modern. It's a pity Daltrey didn't play the lead here. Julia's MacHeath was striking a decade ago in Richard Foreman's brilliant, avant-garde 1976 Broadway staging of "The Threepenny Opera," in which his somewhat bland (though Tony-winning) conception of the role and toneless singing were augmented by the battery of expressionistic effects and spirited performances with which Foreman surrounded him. Unfortunately, Julia's performance here is so enervated that it almost seems redundant to worry about his execution in the last scene--MacHeath was dead on arrival. Strutting about in feather boas and striking dance-hall girl poses, Migenes is an adequate, but very conventional, Jenny; one misses the wondrous eccentricity and dazzle of Lotte Lenya (in G.W. Pabst's 1930 German film version) or Ellen Greene (in the Foreman production), two diseuses who really knew how to pack a wallop. Migenes gives her big "Pirate Jenny" number a brave try, but is undone by Golan's cross-cutting and a too-literal image of a toy galleon surmounted by skeletons. Robertson, however, is something of a find, possessed of a pre-Raphaelite beauty, ingenue acting ability, and a lovely, ethereal voice. Her duet with Daltrey is the film's high point. By contrast, Donovan (as Lucy Brown) is a yowling nuisance whose catfight/duet with Robertson seems calculated to please the kinkier members of the audience. Harris is a bore as Peachum, falling back on drunken slapstick effects with a bottle and a floppy nightcap, and Nighy is even less than that as MacHeath's buddy-nemesis, Tiger Brown (especially since he and Julia lack chemistry). Walters, however, gets the biggest booby prize as Mrs. Peachum, whom she plays with an incessant leer and over-the-top line readings. (Profanity, adult situations, sexual situations.)