The Beggar's Opera

In 1728, at the behest of his friend Jonathan Swift, the English composer John Gay turned out one of the first ballad operas, a trenchant satire of Hanoverian England in which the rascally highwayman Captain Macheath (read: Prime Minister Robert Walpole) endeavors to stay one step ahead of the gallows while dallying with the likes of Polly Peachum, Lucy Lockit, and Jenny Diver. Gay's hit was adapted by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill for their Threepenny Opera, which in this century has eclipsed the original; but it turns out that back in 1953 Peter Brook directed a film version of The Beggar's Opera for Warner Bros., and that's getting a rare screening this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive.

Don't expect Masterpiece Theatre -- this glossy color adaptation, with additional lyrics and dialogue courtesy of playwright Christopher Fry and music by Arthur Bliss (obscuring the Handel-like flavor), serves up Laurence Olivier as a Robin Hood of a hero who even does his own singing (the other characters are doubled). A degree of period flavor infiltrates the Hollywood haze, but Olivier is somewhat brittle (Sean Connery or Roger Moore would be just right), and his singing, though passable, is hardly operatic. At least you can understand him; the singing voices for Polly and Lucy emerge as shrill and the words are often unintelligible (blame in part the bad sound). And it's hard to forget you're watching a studio film, right down to the dreadful rear projection. No lost masterpiece, then, but when Macheath's ladies swing into "Youth's a Season Made for Joy" and the dancing starts up, it's a curiosity well worth your time. At the Harvard Film Archive this Friday and Saturday, May 21 and 22.

-- Jeffrey Gantz