Word: beggar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fewer songs, and its mockery of capitalism is more savagely direct. The stage play rewards the outlaw Mack the Knife for his evil deeds merely with a title and a pension; in the film. Mackie Messer (Rudolph Forster) becomes the director of a bank. As Peachum's beggars prepare to break up a coronation parade (Threepenny Opera owes its inspiration to John Gay's Beggar's Opera, and the scene is London), someone remarks: "The rich have hard hearts -but weak nerves." The line is pure Brecht. He devoted his life to rattling those nerves, and never...
...churches. One of them would dress in rags and rattle a tin cup at the church door while the other whipped out of the car's luggage compartment an assortment of crucifixes, icons, tracts and lamps and did a brisk business at a fat profit until the counterfeit beggar tipped him off that the cops were coming. One day the agents of the Department for Fighting Theft and Speculation seized...
...prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the trivial reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I found, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow. It is not God who will save us-it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit...
Children of Darkness is couched in Mr. Mayer's approximation of the elegant, cynical wit which the English Restoration famously bequeathed to the eighteenth century. It is set in an annex to the Newgate jail, where the villains of The Beggar's Opera sang like caged birds. Yet it obstreperously violates a cardinal rule of the genre to which it aspires to belong: the rule that says that no character may be endowed with the ability to feel profound and communicable pain. The picturesque discomfiture and knavery that are familiar and amusing in Congreve and Gay are gradually...