Stage success, screen failure
It's hard to picture Bertolt Brecht thriving in the collaborative process endemic to filmmaking. Much like such other legendary authors-turned-screenwriters as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, the German playwright-poet could never quite assimilate himself to the demands of the medium; and, like Faulkner, never entirely wanted to. The Criterion Collection is releasing in a highly informative two-disc collection Brecht's first feature-length film as a writer, an adaptation of his "Threepenny Opera." It prompts the question: Did Brecht and celluloid ever get along?
Brecht and his musical collaborator, Kurt Weill, had crafted "The Threepenny Opera," which premiered on the stage in 1928, as a cynical, hard-bitten melodrama of life at the margins. Expected to flop at the box office, "Threepenny" (tailored from an 18th-century work by John Gay, with adaptations of ballads by Francois Villon and Rudyard Kipling) proved a massive theatrical hit in Berlin, and prompted inevitable calls for a cinematic adaptation. Director G.W. Pabst ("Pandora's Box," "Diary of a Lost Girl") was brought in to direct, and Brecht adapted his own play.
By 1930, when Brecht began work on the script, his outlook had markedly changed. Burrowing ever deeper into Marxist dogma, Brecht had grown embarrassed by the rapturous reception "Threepenny" got, and sought to toughen it up for the big screen, tinting it a brighter shade of red. Pabst and the film's producers wanted noth ing of the sort, intending to adapt the hit play Brecht had written, not the Communist-tinged spectacle he was crafting from its ashes. They brought in writer Bela Balazs to go back to the original play and weave it together with strands of Brecht's screen treatment. As it is, this "Threepenny" is an unusual musical adaptation, cutting much of Weill's music (the most beloved part of the show) and leaving a satirical melodrama in its place, with songs cast as musical monologues or dramatic punctuation.
The lack of music drains much of the life from Brecht and Weill's show, leaving a film that is stimulating on a scene-by-scene basis, but ultimately stifling. If Brecht and Weill's work are "songs surrounded by a narrative," as Eric Bentley describes them in a documentary included on the DVD, their diminished presence in the film version of "Threepenny Opera" makes little creative sense. There are moments that ring with Brecht's characteristic rigor, and Pabst's direction is superb, but without half of the show's songs, the link between the drama and Brecht's moralizing is tenuous at best.
The struggle between Mack the Knife (Rudolf Forster), lord of the underworld, and Peachum (Fritz Rasp), "the poorest man in London," sits uncomfortably with spoken and sung pronouncements like "this truth you cannot shirk/ man lives exclusively by dirty work." Mack and Peachum, like nearly all of Brecht's protagonists, are intended to be scoundrels, but Pabst, perhaps influenced by American gangster films, makes Mack into a charmer - a villain we cannot help but admire for his pluck and dash, more Jean Gabin than Peter Lorre.
Adaptations of Brecht by other writers and directors have also failed to live up to the standards set by the plays. Explanations for the lack of classic Brecht adaptations are many, but one possible reason may lie in the nature of Brecht's plays. Brecht's theatrical work was predicated on smashing the pretense of immersion, dedicating itself to reminding audiences that what they were watching was not real life, but a mere fiction. Film, being a child of theater, has always been overly respectful of its parent, treating theatrical adaptations as occasions for hushed awe rather than opportunities for invention. This attitude might work for Shakespeare, or Ibsen, but Brecht's work demands a more muscular, experimental approach. Brecht's true cinematic inheritors are not the adaptors of his plays, but rather troublemakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Lars von Trier, who insist on continually waking us from the lulling sleep of narrative.
The year after "Threepenny," another Brecht script, "Kuhle Wampe," raised hackles. Named after a Berlin district, the film concerns the suicide of an unemployed young man, and was banned by Weimar-era censors, and later condemned by the Nazis. "One fewer out of work," a woman sardonically comments on seeing the corpse splayed out on the ground, capturing the sense of economic hopelessness and moral rot that characterized the Berlin of the early 1930s - a situation that Brecht keenly hoped would lead to communist revolution.
The rise of the Nazis saw Brecht become a permanent refugee, fleeing from Berlin to Prague to Austria to France to Denmark to the United States. Dismissive of movies as a prime example of politically reactionary culture, Brecht nonetheless was hopeful that the working classes could be "taught to think" through them. Work, though, was hard to come by. Fellow German exile Fritz Lang hired Brecht in 1942 to work with him on a ripped-from-the-headlines script about the hunt for Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich's assassins. Brecht eventually turned in a 300-page script, and was politely booted off the project, replaced by veteran screenwriter John Wexley.
The always litigious Brecht eventually took Wexley to a writer's court, claiming that he, too, had played a role in writing the film (which would come to be called "Hangmen Also Die," not Brecht's "Trust the People"). The court turned him down, but he eventually received a story credit on the film, Americanized as "Bert" Brecht. There is a Brechtian quality to the assaultive opening titles, which informed wartime moviegoers that "Neither the betrayal of Czechoslovakia nor the blood-bath loosed by Hitler's hordes, could conquer the spirit of this people." Little of Brecht otherwise remains, except the Czech underground's distinct resemblance to a secret Communist cell. As James J. Lyon points out in "Bertolt Brecht in America," Brecht would nonetheless have been pleased to know that, in one crucial jailhouse scene, American moviegoers would hear Czech prisoners singing part of a Communist political song.
Brecht continued to spin out fresh movie ideas with amazing alacrity, but his notion of what might fly in Hollywood was out of touch with the studios' commercial-minded mentality. Just try to imagine him selling Louis B. Mayer on "The Bread King Learns Bread Baking," wherein greedy bread magnate Joe Fleischhacker discovers he loves the taste of a poor woman's homemade bread. A registered "enemy alien," required to be home by 8 every evening during the war years, Brecht found little to his liking in Los Angeles. In one poem of the time, Brecht wrote: "On thinking about Hell, I gather/ my brother Shelley found it was a place/ Much like the city of London. I/ Who live in Los Angeles and not in London/ Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be/ Still more like Los Angeles."
Brecht eventually fled the United States, winding up in East Germany, after giving contradictory and perjurious testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his Communist ties. His interludes as a screenwriter and filmmaker mostly forgotten, Brecht returned to his first loves, theater and poetry.
Bertolt Brecht's dalliance with film is a story of missed opportunity. The self-aggrandizing playwright thought himself too talented for Hollywood, not realizing that if any medium could stimulate the masses, and inoculate them with his radical artistic and political ideas, it was film. Brecht's failed efforts as a moviemaker belie the extent to which his style - of simple stories told complexly, of hybrids of song and melodrama and comedy - was inherently cinematic. "The Threepenny Opera" provides only hints of what might have been had Brecht dedicated himself to the medium he so thoroughly disdained.
