Olivier's failure in the realm of musical comedy would have mattered no more than his failure in the realm of musicianship had it not been redoubled by a failure in the realm of reality. His highwayman is not only no singer, he is not only no musical comedian; he is no highwayman. The lightness of John Gay's manner is in direct, not inverse, ratio to his seriousness as a satirist; if his Beggar's Opera says nothing, it is nothing.

The nullity of the film cannot be attributed to limitations in either Sir Laurence's technique or his powers of characterization. It must in great part be laid at the door of the adaptor, Christopher Fry, and the director, Peter Brook.

Pure pleasure—the ballad-opera about the highwayman Captain Macheath and his escapes from the law and the ladies, with Laurence Olivier doing his own singing (he has a pleasant light baritone) as the dashing Macheath. This is one of his most playful, sophisticated, and least-known roles. It was Swift who suggested that a “Newgate pastoral might make an odd pretty sort of thing,” and John Gay worked out the idea in a new form—a musical play with the lyrics fitted to existing music. To Londoners weary of the bombast of Italian opera, Gay’s corrupt gang of thieves, highwaymen, whores, and informers was the fresh, sweet breath of England. Gay satirized the politics of the day as well as the heroics of Italian opera; many of his targets are now a matter for historians, but the large butt of the joke—the corruption and hypocrisy of mankind—still sits around. And by the time Peter Brook directed this film (his first, and the only comedy he has ever made), a new set of conventions, as tired and inflated as Italian opera, was ready for potshots—the conventions of the movies: the chaste heroines, the intrepid Robin Hood heroes, the phony realism.