German Film Festival (2) - Barrie Pattison grapples with MACKIE MESSER - BRECHT'S DREIGROSCHENFILM (Joachim Lang)

Clive James once observed “Bertold Brecht is all right in his place….. (pause) which is East Germany.” Director Joachim Lang obviously disagrees. He’s made a career out of documentaries about Brecht and the new Mackie Messer - Brecht’s Dreigroschenfilm is a whole lot of things including an attempt to re-invent the musical, put the author’s life and theoretical position on film and make the movie that Brecht wanted out of his surprise nineteen twenties hit “Die Dreigroschenoper/The Threepenny Opera.”

How far Joachim Lang succeeds and how worthwhile those objectives are is debatable but I certainly found fascinating watching him try. The work’s familiar Kurt Weill numbers punctuating the action, an account of the first production in a Berlin during the rise of the Nazis (actuality with the flag made scarlet) and the subsequent attempts to turn the play into a film that would satisfy Brecht’s Marxist conscience, the producer’s ambitions and the censor all have a charge and the filming is elaborate. It mixes realistic re-stagings, large scale movie choreography and dramatic scenes where they put the author’s words into actor Lars Eidinger’s mouth. The mix of musical, documentary and agit-prop is a big juggling act which comes off better than anyone had a right to expect. 

Brecht is quoted as calling the movie business a branch of global drug trafficking and a few glimpses of the original play show his severe view of entertainment - Jenny’s Judas kiss, Hannah Herzsprung’s Carola Neher/Polly pondering the lives taken in having the criminal gang accumulate the finery for her wedding feast, Joachim Król as Peachum cataloguing the injuries which are publicly acceptable for the beggars he puts on the street to a genuine amputee reduced to tending the outfit’s dogs. 

The piece however does reflect then contemporary German (and Germanic) movies. The beggar costumes hang in Peachum’s ceiling, like the miners’ chained clothes in Kameradschaft’s showers. He has a wall size map of London like the one in Kriminal Kommissar Lohman’s office and the on screen setting houses two moons the way the one in  Sunrise did.

Producer Seymour Nebenzal (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse or the two films of M) figures as the villain. Kurt Gerron and director George Wilhelm Pabst are conspicuously absent. The new film’s Britta Hammelstein and Meike Droste are certainly a lot better looking than the real Lotte Lenya and Helene Weigl they portray. 

Film form is remarkable with material like the glimpsed on-stage horse, a giant Thames arch decor and some sophisticated effects work where photos spring to life (again - but better than we’re used to), different layers mutating within the same shot or the confrontation between the beggars and the police who open fire on them only to have the mob pass through their ranks wraith-like. Inspector Rex handler Tobias Moretti’s Mack the Knife leads gangsters who metamorphose into suit and tie bankers with brief cases. 

It all funnels down to the court action where Eidinger attempts to have the producers, who have paid him a large sum, restrained from making a film that deviates from his revised vision. The issues of intellectual property and social conscience are pushed to the front. Having the judges watch the production in their court room crystallizes the Brechtian concept of law as theater with the author’s defeat presented as his justification.

Me, I’d like to see Joachim Lang’s movie biography of Heinrich George star of Hitlerjunge Quex and the mechanic in Metropolis.