On 10 November 2020, I watched and greatly enjoyed the 1989 movie version of the very popular Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill stage musical The Threepenny Opera, which debuted in 1928, and was in turn based upon the equally popular 1720s John Gay musical The Beggar's Opera.
Directed by Menahem Golan, and released in 1989, this movie version of TheThreepenny Opera is entitled Mack the Knife after (and thence in order to trade upon) the immediate recognition factor of the musical's most famous song, which serves to introduce us to the lead character at the film's beginning but has also become an absolute corker of a standard, recorded by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Louis Armstrong, and even Robbie Williams.
Oozing suave insincerity and sinister insouciance from every becloaked pore, Raul Julia heads the cast as the charming but thoroughly villainous Macheath. His co-stars include Richard Harris, Bill Nighy, and Julie Walters (who seemed to be channelling the late great Hylda Baker in places!), plus Roger Daltrey as a street singer who also serves as the narrator.
Yet what made this movie such an especial pleasure to watch for me was that although it was based upon a musical that I'd already heard of, i.e. The Threepenny Opera, their actual plot was entirely unknown to me (a rarity indeed!). So I had no idea what to expect, which is always great (but not always possible) when watching a movie.
It turns out that its lead character Macheath (Mack the Knife is his ominous nickname, for reasons that soon become obvious) is a criminal kingpin eluding justice behind a paper-thin veneer of respectability and covertly based in the shady backstreets of Victorian London (in The Beggar's Opera from two centuries earlier, he was a highwayman). In addition, he is a legendary yet wholly amoral lothario.
Over the years, Macheath's reputation on both counts has spread far and wide, but equally his daring escapades again on both counts ultimately attract the acute attention of the law, resulting in all manner of machinations as everyone strives to snare their infamously elusive quarry. My prior ignorance of the storyline to any version of this musical meant that its decidedly tricksy climactic scene came as a total surprise to me. Let's just say Deus Ex Machina In Excelsis!
Moreover, although I knew of The Threepenny Opera as a stage musical, I had no idea that this movie version of it even existed until just a few hours before watching it, when Facebook friend Hakim Colclough mentioned in another FB group how extremely rare Mack the Knife's official VHS videocassette was (and, very strangely, it has never been released on DVD at all). But when I looked on YouTube to see if there were any Mack the Knife trailers or excerpts, imagine how startled but delighted I was to find that this entire movie had been uploaded there to watch for free! So that is precisely what I did, and I enjoyed it immensely.
Consequently, I thoroughly recommend anyone else who likes watching movie musicals to click here and do the same while this fantastic but rare to chance upon film is still there, just in case – in faithful if fateful homage to its lead character's notoriously adept powers of disappearance – it suddenly vanishes, as so often happens with online movies. Also be sure to click here to view Bobby Darin's classic version of its title song 'Mack the Knife', which was a #1 smash hit for him in both the UK and the USA during 1959, the year in which he recorded his performance of it in this clip on YouTube.
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