The Beggar's Opera (Warner) brings John Gay's renowned, raffish 18th century opera to the screen in English for the first time.* In the role of the highwayman Macheath, Shakespearean Actor Laurence Olivier also sings on the screen for the first time, in an agreeable, light baritone, and makes a fine, swashbuckling badman.
As adapted by Dennis Canaan and Christopher Fry, the film is a spirited horse opera, a kind of galloping, Hogarthian western, set to Sir Arthur Bliss's arrangement of the John Pepusch score.
There are tumultuous sequences as Olivier, after a wild fandango...
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