The Beggar's Opera (1953)

Directors

Peter Brook

Cast

Athene Seyler, Dorothy Tutin, Eric Pohlmann, George Devine, George Rose, Hugh Griffith, Laurence Naismith, Laurence Olivier, Margot Grahame, Mary Clare, Stanley Holloway, Stuart Burge, Yvonne Furneaux

The story

In the 1700s, a beggar is tossed into London's Newgate jail, along with a pile of papers upon which his unfinished opera is scribbled. The beggar boasts to the other prisoners that his opera, unlike others of the day, is about a real person, the dashing highwayman Captain Macheath, who, dressed in a red coat, holds off the world with a pistol in each hand, seduces women with five notes of a tune, and generally leaps from misfortune. To the beggar's disappointment, the other prisoners point out that his hero Macheath is among them, in irons and behind bars, and Macheath, who is scheduled to be executed the next morning, admits that there…

Genres

Film metadata comes from the open sources listed in Credits & Contact. Catalogue details may be incomplete.

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