No small number of people despise Mark Steyn's politics and his tendency to leave a lot of blood in the water when he tackles an issue. But if you want to know something about an entry in the Great American Songbook, you will find few more knowledgeable sources and almost none who can sum up a story so well.
On the occasion of the July death of Frank Foster, one of the arrangers of the Bobby Darin version of "Mack the Knife" that defines the song for most people who know it, Steyn relates the history of the tune, from its beginnings in a Weimar-era German opera to one of the standard swinging belt songs of today. Steyn notes the character of Mack predates the opera where the song came into being, dating back to a 1728 opera that the 1920s Germans updated.
I've got pretty much nothing to add to Steyn's history of the song, which may be more than interests some people. But I would note something that I can't believe he missed. "Mack the Knife" appeared as a moritat or "murder song" in the opera Die Dreigroschenoper, which is known in English as "The Threepenny Opera." Die Dreigroschenoper has been made into a movie three different times. The first was in 1931 and was actually two movies made at the same time -- one in German and one in French. The most recent one was called Mack the Knife and was released in 1989 with Raul Julia as Macheath, the "Mack" of the title. Andy Serkis of Gollum and Planet of the Apes motion-capture fame is supposed to be working on a new version with the decidedly dark lyrical mind of Nick Cave, which should be interesting if it ever comes out.
The second filmed version of Die Dreigroschenoper, released in 1962, starred among others Curt Jurgens and Gert Fröbe, who also appeared together that year -- along with almost everybody else -- in the D-Day war movie The Longest Day. But that's not all they share. Jurgens, who was sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis for being "politically unreliable," would in 1977 match wits with British Secret Service agent 007 James Bond as Karl Stromberg, a megalomaniac who wanted to start a nuclear war so people would be forced to move to undersea habitats he would control. Fröbe, who used his membership in the Nazi party to hide two German Jews from the Gestapo, had already faced down 007 and lost back in 1964 as Auric Goldfinger, a megalomaniac who wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb at Fort Knox and destroy America's gold supply, leaving him with the largest gold reserves in the world.
Mack the Knife and James the Spy are both fictional characters, but it's interesting that if you want to play a degrees of separation game with them you don't have to take too many steps.
In early '56, no fewer than five versions of this song made the Billboard chart; all of them were titled something like "Moritat (Theme from 'The Three Penny Opera')", and none of them mentioned ol' Mackie on the label. (Louis Armstrong put out a version actually listed as "Mack the Knife," but it didn't chart.) Most of them have long since been forgotten in the wake of Bobby Darin's humongous hit, four years later.
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