The Beggar's Opera
Not yet rated
Time Out says
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
Release details
UK release:
1952
Duration:
94 mins
Cast and crew
Director:
Cast:
Dorothy Tutin, Stanley Holloway, Daphne Anderson, Sandra Dorne, Yvonne Furneaux, George Devine, Laurence Naismith, Athene Seyler, George Rose, Laurence Olivier, Hugh Griffith, Kenneth Williams
Producer:
Laurence Olivier, Herbert Wilcox
Screenwriter:
Cinematography:
Editor:
Art Director:
William C Andrews, Georges Wakévitch
Comments
Add +