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The Beggar's Opera (1952)

Director: Peter Brook

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From Time Out Film Guide

A commercial disaster, Peter Brook's first movie has gradually grown in stature as more people have discovered its delights. John Gay's original concoction satirised the conventions of Italian opera and dumped them into Merrie England's morass of highwaymen, whores and hangmen. The movie, with the music adapted by Arthur Bliss, and the script adapted by Dennis Cannan and Christopher Fry, sets out to send up what was already partly a send-up; and Brook, of course, was the ideal director, committed to radical theatre and disrespectful (or innocent) of cinematic forms. He has trouble when dialogue gives way to song (though even here one might call this a Brechtian device, as in The Threepenny Opera), but gets performances from Olivier (as the swashbuckling MacHeath) and Tutin (as Polly Peachum) of such mellifluous exuberance that the cracks are neatly sealed.

Author: ATu 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

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Cast & crew

Director: Peter Brook

Producer: Laurence Olivier, Herbert Wilcox

Cast: Hugh Griffith, Laurence Olivier, Dorothy Tutin, Stanley Holloway, Daphne Anderson, Sandra Dorne, Yvonne Furneaux, George Devine, Laurence Naismith, Athene Seyler, George Rose, Kenneth Williams full cast

Genre(s): Musicals

Duration: 94 mins


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