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"Gentlemen, this truth you cannot shirk / Man lives exclusively by dirty work." An artificial London, cf. Carné's Drôle de drame, the camera tracks through crooked streets to reach the waterfront, the only patch of sky is streamed with masts. Mack the Knife (Rudolf Forster), bowler hat and spats and all, proposing to the ingénue (Carola Neher) in a bit of pantomime reflected on a window display. Their wedding banquet is a warehouse full of purloined ornaments, in song the bride explains the appeal of the underworld dandy: "He tossed his hat on the peg in my room / And I no longer knew what I was doing..." G.W. Pabst's screen adjustment of the Brecht-Weill "Stück mit Musik," smooth and romantic where the original is jagged and caustic, a pungent Weimar snapshot all the same. The antihero is old chums with the Scotland Yard chief (Reinhold Schünzel), his father-in-law turns out to be the King of Beggars (Fritz Rasp). Gesture and rhythm reign in rivalry with Clair, "goes with the profession," a chiaroscuro cabaret not too far removed from The Front Page. The racket without a boss "like soup without a spoon," the missus replaces Mack while he hides out in a Toulouse-Lautrec brothel and takes over the city bank. Lounging in the wings yet dominating every inch of her space is the semi-discarded lover (Lotte Lenya), in her mind a sinewy pirate leading an apocalyptic cannonade against the Victorian Möbius strip. "The rich of this world have no qualms about causing misery but can't bear the sight of it," wretches on parade give Her Majesty an eyeful on coronation day, the crowd is last seen marching into murkiness as hoodlums graduate to politics. "Hear that, nitwits? There's a lesson there." Lang achieves all of this and more in You and Me. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. With Valeska Gert, Hermann Thimig, Ernst Busch, Paul Kemp, Gustav Püttjer, and Vladimir Sokoloff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |