Word: beggar
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...with Christmas less than a week away, and Maurice Chevalier celebrating his fiftieth year in the entertainment business, only a misanthrope would criticize the French actor's anniversary movie very severely. Scrooge himself, if he were a critic (and what better occupation for him?), would point out that the beggar who inherits a fortune and finds himself better off without it is getting to be pretty stale plot material. It would take a sadistic pedant to insist that Chevalier's beggar changes character a little as he changes financial position, or to say that Ma Pomme contains several genuinely dull...
...adjectives. "Brilliant" pretty well covers the production, but no one word is enough. Kurt Weill and Bert Brecht's composition is also beautiful and funny and splendid. A greatness of the opera lies in the fact that it is contrapuntally ugly and sad and tawdry. It is the grinning beggar on the street who wants to amuse but gets a raw pleasure from turning his check to show scars or festering gashes...
Many such productions, like "Saint Joan of the Stock Yards," and "The Rise of the City of Mahogany," were sharply cynical social criticisms. Mare Blitzstein translated one of these, "The Threepenny Opera," whose original script was by Brecht with score by Kurt Weill. This take-off on "The Beggar's Opera" employs such epic techniques as a blackout before songs, then a spot-light on one character who sings about the action and its implications. If the actor doesn't clarify the situation, there are placards on stage explaining what is being sung...
Echoes on Granite. It took less than two years for Painter Gauguin to become a homeless, penniless beggar...
...movie. When he wants to become a "good boy," his mother throws him out into the street; when he stops Jaibo from beating a friend over the head, the friend is already dead. When he gets a job, Jaibo causes him to lose it. An old blind beggar sums up the mood of the show when he says, as Jaibo falls dead from police bullets, "One less . . . they all will end that way. They should be killed before they are born...