Kurt Weill Movies

The Los Angeles Opera mounted this stage production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny (AKA Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), translated by Michael Feingold and starring Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Anthony Dean Griffey and Robert Wörle. John Doyle directs; the Orchestra and Chorus of the Los Angeles Opera, under the leadership of maestro James Conlon, provide musical accompaniment. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

This Canadian documentary profiles the work of German music-theater icon Kurt Weill, who created such enduring shows as Threepenny Opera. Most of the film offers various performers singing or reciting his songs. Among those appearing are jazz diva Betty Carter, the Brodsky String Quartet, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and bassist Charlie Haden. Also seen are dance numbers, and a reading of "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's final collaboration, Peter Sellars inter-cuts footage he personally shot in on-location in America with original footage of the stage performance to achieve a striking visual effect. Teresa Stratas and Nora Kimball star, and conductor Kent Nagano leads the Orchestra of the Lyon Opera. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Woody Allen's black-and-white curiosity piece is a mixture of influences -- from German silent film expressionism to Franz Kafka's nightmare worlds to the contemporary fables of Wim Wenders. Woody Allen plays the nebbish clerk Kleinman (in a throwback to his characters from Sleeper and Love and Death), who is awakened in the middle of the night by a vigilante group who want him to help capture a serial killer on the loose. Kleinman reluctantly agrees, but when he gets to the street, the vigilantes are gone and Kleinmen spends most of the film wandering the shadowy back alleys in search of the citizen's brigade. Meanwhile, a circus is in town. When sword-swallower Irmy (Mia Farrow) catches her creepy clown husband (John Malkovich) getting familiar with trapeze artist Marie (Madonna), she packs her bags and heads for town, where she meets up with Kleinman. This meeting sets up a number of plot lines that has Irmy befriending a trio of prostitutes (Jodie Foster, Lily Tomlin and Kathy Bates) at the local brothel and accepting $700 from a university student (John Cusack) who wants to sleep with her. She finally meets up with her husband, and they then find an abandoned baby which they decide to raise as their own. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Johnny Walker (Anthony Michael Hall) is a hot-shot high-school quarterback who receives intoxicating offers from spirited college recruiters in this adolescent teen comedy. Bathroom humor and sight gags are strung together in a story involving booze, broads, and other benefits for the coveted quarterback. Robert Downey Jr., Uma Thurman, and Paul Gleason co-star. Even cameos from Jim McMahon and Howard Cosell can't save this feature from itself, though it isn't the fault of the cast. Originally rated PG-13, it was reedited to R (with scenes added) for a home video release. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Woody Allen's gentle and nostalgic tribute to the glory days of radio and coming-of-age during World War II plays like Fellini's Amarcord filtered through Neil Simon. The nominal star is Seth Green as Joe, a teenage Jewish boy, growing up with a house full of relatives in Brooklyn. Allen cuts between Joe's working class neighborhood of Rockaway Beach, Queens, and the glittery and glamorous world of radio in Manhattan. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Lost in the Stars was an American Film Theatre adaptation of the musical play by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill--which in turn was based on the Alain Paton novel Cry the Beloved Country. Brock Peters portrays a South African minister who goes to the Big City to locate his son Raymond St. Jacques, who is now a criminal in the eyes of the white rulers. The minister forges a curious, foredoomed friendship with a white farmer (Paul Rogers). Lost in the Stars has sometimes been accused of blunting the edge of Paton's angry study of the cruelties of Apartheid; fans of musical theatre will be more politely inclined to this loving filmization of the Broadway play. On its own, Cry the Beloved Country was previously filmed in 1951, with Canada Lee, Sidney Poitier and Charles Carson. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

With location scenes lensed in Italy, September Affair is consistently good to look at, even when the pacing flags and the dialogue becomes too verbose. Joan Fontaine and Joseph Cotten star as married couple Manina and David. Trouble is, they're not married to each other. Through a series of misunderstandings, Manina and David are listed among the victims of a plane crash. Since the world at large considers them dead, the couple decides to start a whole new life together. Eventually, however, the guilt they share regarding their respective spouses overrides their passions. September Affair is remembered today as the film that catapulted a 12-year-old record -- Walter Huston's rendition of "September Song" -- to the top of the 1950 hit parade. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this engagingly silly musical fantasy from the waning days of WW2, Fred MacMurray stars as Bill, who wants to serve his country but has been classified 4-F. While working at a local USO, Bill falls in love with the fickle Lucilla (June Haver, soon to be Mrs. Fred MacMurray), never realizing that he himself is worshipped from afar by the sensible Sally (Joan Leslie). Stumbling across an old lamp donated to a scrap drive, Bill impulsively rubs the lamp--and out pops Ali (Gene Sheldon), a bibulous, bumbling genie. Hoping to become a hero in Lucilla's eyes, Bill asks Ali to put him in the US Army. The genie complies, but gets his wires crossed, and Bill ends up in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. In short order, Bill meets two lookalikes of the girls in his life at "Ye U.S.O.", shows up at Valley Forge and trades quips with General Washington (Alan Mowbray)--who, in anticipation of MacArthur and Eisenhower, bombastically insists that he has no political aspirations--unsuccessfully tries to alert Washington of the duplicity of Benedict Arnold (John Davidson), and ultimately finds himself behind enemy lines with a troop of Hessians, whom he tries to hoodwink by delivering a Nuremberg-style speech, replete with "Sieg Heils." Arrested and sentenced to a Hessian firing squad, Bill again summons Ali, who whisks him off to the year 1492. In an elaborate "opera bouffe", Bill musically dissuades the sailors serving under Christopher Columbus (Fortunio Bonanova) from staging a mutiny, convincing them to continue seeking out the New World (as represented by a group of Cuban natives in a conga line). Once on dry land, Bill is entranced by a comely Indian maiden who looks a lot like Lucilla, only to be entrapped in an old-fashioned "badger game" cooked up by the girl's wily Native American boyfriend (Anthony Quinn). Buying his way out of an embarrassing situation by agreeing to purchase Manhattan Island for $24, Bill is then transported to "New Amsterdam" in the mid-1600s. In his efforts to persuade the local Dutch elders that he is the rightful owner of Manhattan, Bill succeeds only in getting arrested again. This time, however, the drunken Ali manages to zap our hero back to the 20th Century--with the 17th-century equivalent of Sally in tow. The songs, by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin, are appropriately bright and satirical, but none are standouts. Still, Where Do We Go From Here? is one of those frothy 1940s concoctions that is absolutely impossible to dislike. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The wild and woolly early days of New York -- when it was still known as New Amsterdam -- provide the backdrop for this period musical-comedy. In 1650, Peter Stuyvesant (Charles Coburn) arrives in New Amsterdam to assume his duties as governor. Stuyvesant is hardly the fun-loving type, and one of his first official acts is to call for the death of Brom Broeck (Nelson Eddy), a newspaper publisher well-known for his fearless exposes of police and government corruption. However, Broeck hasn't done anything that would justify the death penalty, so Stuyvesant waits (without much patience) for Broeck to step out of line. Broeck is romancing a beautiful woman named Tina Tienhoven (Constance Dowling), whose sister Ulda (Shelley Winters) happens to be dating his best friend, Ten Pin (Johnnie "Scat" Davis). After Stuyvesant's men toss Broeck in jail on a trumped-up charge, Stuyvesant sets his sights on winning Tina's affections. However, as Broeck begins to organize his fellow New Amsterdamians in a bid for independence, he tries to convince Stuyvesant that working for justice might do him more good that following his current policies of graft and corruption. Based on a Broadway musical with songs by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, Knickerbocker Holiday's score was beefed up for its screen incarnation with a number of new tunes by Sammy Cahn and Jules Styne, though the best known song from the stage version remained the best remembered selection from the film, September Song. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A longtime admirer of Broadway impresario Flo Ziegfeld, Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn hoped to emulate the success of The Ziegfeld Follies by producing an annual movie-musical revue. Goldwyn's dream began and ended with 1938's Goldwyn Follies, a film centering on Goldwyn-like movie producer Oliver Martin (Adolphe Menjou). It seems that Martin's films haven't been turning a profit lately, and he wants to find out why by eliciting the advice of the average filmgoer. He makes the acquaintance of pretty Hazel Dawes (Andrea Leeds), who tells Martin that the movies suffer from unbelievable storylines, cliched dialogue and wooden acting. Impressed, Martin hires Hazel as "Miss Humanity," allowing her to judge the merits of his latest production and even to select the cast members. Among Hazel's discoveries are singing hash-slinger Danny Beecher (Kenny Baker), opera diva Leona Jerome (Helen Jepson), and prima ballerina Olga Samara (Vera Zorina). Also hoping to appear in Martin's upcoming epic are ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and his wisecracking dummy Charlie McCarthy, and a trio of zany animal trainers who look, sound and act like the Ritz Brothers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Filmmaker G.W. Pabst's adaptation of Bertoldt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera (Die Dreisgoschenoper) is every bit as good as the stage original, and sometimes even better. Filmed in both German and French versions with different casts (a planned English-language version was abandoned), Threepenny is most readily available today in its German incarnation. Rudolf Forster stars as robber captain MacHeath -- aka Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife -- who falls in love with Polly (Carola Neher), daughter of beggar king Peachum (Fritz Rasp). Despising MacHeath, Peachum plots the thief's downfall with his best friend, corrupt police official Tiger Brown (Reinhold Schunzel). The satirical "happy ending" of the original -- MacHeath, en route to the gallows, suddenly and without motivation promoted to knighthood! -- is altered somewhat by Pabst and his scenarists to accommodate a swipe against Depression-era bankers. Lotte Lenya, Weill's wife, brilliantly repeats her stage role as Pirate Jenny. Stylistically, Threepenny Opera is a Georg Grosz drawing come to life; despite its 1890s London setting, the film's calculatedly tawdry veneer is clearly meant to represent the wide-open Berlin of the 1930s. For the record: the French version of Threepenny Opera starred Albert Prejean as MacHeath. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide