Set somewhat curiously in Victorian London*, the film sets two Dickensian (I couldn’t help but think of Oliver Twist) gangs against one another: Peachum and his beggars, and Mack and his thieves. Peachum profits off the poor while Mack imitates and inverts bourgeois respectability. By the film’s close, both end up in a bank and capitalism is equated with criminality. Simultaneously, the masses (quite literally thousands of beggars) take to the streets in protest, representing a proletarian uprising. The proletarians are pitted against the capitalists, and Brecht and Weill’s audiences are left questioning their own statuses: typically bourgeoisie, they were closer to the corrupt bankers than the revolting proles. This jab at the bourgeoise theatre-going audience thus reflects Brecht’s Marxist inclinations and Weill’s own “evolution” from “conventional young classical composer to an unashamed, if still idealistic, composer for the commercial stage” (Rockwell, 51).
The film’s songs are sung not by its capitalistic symbols but by the people: the busker-narrator, and the prostitute Jenny. The songs are mostly simple in form, repetitive in structure, and stylistically indebted to jazz. They are accessible and consumable. (As we discussed in class last week, even if its lyrics are foreign or complex, a melody such as that of Ballad Of Mack The Knife is hummable). A quote that really struck me from the film comes from Mack, after hearing Polly sing at their wedding. After his criminal-employees describe her singing as “nice”, Mack declares: “It wasn’t ‘nice’, you idiots! It’s not nice, it’s art.” (time stamp – 38:56). I assumed that this, again, was a jab at the bourgeois theatre-going audience. Mack, the small-time capitalist, attempts to possess the music as his own, as “art”. However, his less powerful subjects also react to the music. To them, it is merely a “nice” popular song. I thought this moment of the film corresponded well with the Hailey reading, in which Klaus Pringsheim writes: “music is divorced from life and separated from the people: that is what music has come to at the close of its bourgeois era” (Hailey, 26). In setting side-by-side the reactions of Mack and his subjects, Brecht (or Pabst), as I interpreted it, was criticising the over-intellectualisation of music. The fact that both audiences responded to the music in such a way instead fulfils Brecht and Weill’s desire of reaching a broader audience. After all, “What is a theatre without an audience?” (Hailey, 27).
*I’m also intrigued by what people made of the film’s setting. Why London rather than Berlin?
