Thurman Arnold: Clarence Darrow Anecdote, Hard Work

Thurman Arnold (1891-1969) had a high profile career as an attorney, deputy attorney general for FDR, Associate Justice of the DC Court of Appeals, author, and founder of the firm Arnold & Porter.  (Wiki here).

Memorable Anecdote 

In his autobiography Fair Fights & Foul, he relays an anecdote from Clarence Darrow on how to build a successful legal career.

• PDF in cloud here.

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Text of Arnold anecdote:

Clarence Darrow, whom I knew and admired, once told me of an
occasion when he was asked to state for a magazine article the 
principal cause of his success. He asked the interviewer what the
other successful people whose names were to appear in the article
had thought was the cause of their success. The interviewer in-
formed Darrow that most of them had said that their success was
due. to hard work.

“Put me down for that too,” said Darrow.

He continued, “I was
brought up on a farm. When I was a young man, on a very hot day
I was engaged in distributing and packing down the hay which a
horse-propelled stacker was constantly dumping on top of me. By
noon I was completely exhausted. That afternoon I left the farm,
never to return, and I haven’t done a day of hard work since.”

Darrow’s concept was accurate. I would advise any young man
who has an allergy toward hard work to train himself for the law,
where he can achieve reasonable affluence by writing, talking, and
thinking. Thus he will give the appearance of working hard, for
the hours are long and the law appears to the layman to be abstruse
and difficult. But, as I have observed before, legal learning
is the art of making simple things complicated, which should be an
easy task for anyone. Paradoxically, the great lawyer is frequently
one who can make simple and intelligible matters which lawyers
and judges regard as complex.

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A 1974 one-man play about Darrow by actor Henry Fonda streams on YouTube, here.

Brecht's Three Penny Opera: A New Film from Germany

Bertolt Brecht was Weimar Germany's version of Orson Welles - a young dynamo.  And Kurt Weill was the forerunner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, bringing homage-or-parody of diverse musical styles into the modern musical theater. 

See it all brought to life in a new German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm (The 3-Penny Film).

How I Ran Across This...

How I ran across this...the film hasn't played in the U.S. yet.  It had its run in October 2018 in Germany. 

I loved the 2018 Netflix series Babylon Berlin, a richly complex drama with intersecting plot lines set in Berlin in 1928.  (16 episodes, about 12 hours).   I wrote about it in great detail here.   One of the significant supporting players is the heir to an industrial fortune, Alfred Nyssen (rhymes with Thyssen?) played by Lars Eidinger. 

Lars Eidinger had a small but well-played role in the recent German film, Never Look Away, about German artist Gerhard Richter, set in the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's.   (German title, Werke ohne Autor).  The director is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who directed the award-winning The Lives of Others (Das Leben des Anderen) in 2006.    I had to do some googling to realize that the character (a museum docent) in Never Look Away was the actor I recalled from somewhere - which was Lars Eidinger from Babylon Berlin.   This google search turned up the Youtube trailer of a 2018 German film, Mackie Messer: Der Dreigroschenfilm.  It stars Lars Eidinger.   (Trailer here).

Ok, So What is the "Mackie Messer" Movie?

Prior Films
Three Penny Opera was filmed by Pabst in 1931 (and banned by the Nazis in 1933).   There was a US version with Raul Julia in 1989 as Mack the Knife (here). 

New Film!
This is a stunning German production.

The DVD was released in early April 2019, and I got a copy from Amazon.de.    To my surprise it doesn't have any English subtitles, and I variably can follow 50%-80% in German. 

It's a big budget, big cast production.  It's also a whimsical film.  It opens on the afternoon of the premiere of Three Penny Opera, amidst crisis, screaming actors, edgy producers, and a bemused but unrelenting Brecht, as played by Eidinger.   Most of the movie takes place in either a fantasy world or in Brecht's imagination, as he consents to a film version and we see him in vignettes of his debates and fights with the film production company.

Eventually, we end up in a courtroom, as did the actual film effort in 1930.   Brecht had a mixed court victory - the 1931 version was produced and released, but an angry and dissatisfied Brecht won the right to make his own, improved, idiosyncratic version (which never happened). 

Brecht wrote a long essay about this, Der Dreigroschenprozess (The Three Penny Trial). 

Basically, the new movie allows us to see an elaborate highlights reel or abridged version of Threepenny, with all of its main songs brought to screen.   The acting and production values are excellent.

There's a creative bent, breaking the fourth wall a lot.  Brecht will be arguing with his producers in their office, and the camera pans left, and we're suddenly in a Dickensian street scene from the play.   At the end, the actors are dancing and singing across modern London rather than Dickensian sets.  The film closes with Eidinger, in costume as Brecht-1929, leaving the Theater am Schiffbauerdam into the Berlin of our modern day, surrounded by modern video cameras and reporters, and he sits by the (real) Brecht statue in the Brecht park and gives us his final thoughts on what we've seen.

As Brecht ("How Good is Eidinger as Brecht?")

_

In Babylon Berlin

In Never Look Away (Werke ohne Author)

IMDB here.
German: Wikipedia here, film website here.
It actually may have played one night only in NYC, in January 2019 - here.
YouTube trailer here.
For a review of the film in English, by Luisa Rollenhagan by LA Review of Books, January 2019, here.

Closing Thought

Around 1990, I was in Toronto and saw a small local-theater production about the making of Three Penny Opera, the young Brecht, the young Weill banging away composing on a piano, millennials of 1928 trying to bring their play together against the odds.

Threepenny Opera last ran commercially in 2015 in Los Angeles.  There was also a 2016 production at USC.

I mentioned that von Donnersmarck directed Eidinger in Never Look Away.   That film stars Tom Schilling, who starred in one of my favorite movies, 2014's "Coffee In Berlin."

For an article on Brecht's brief time as a medical student, here.

Maybe (?) English translation of the new 3PO film is absent from the DVD because it would run afoul of prior English translation rights and restrictions for the work.

I mentioned that I had seen Lars Eidinger in Babylon Berlin and in Never Look Away, which led me to triangulate his role in Mackie Messer.   Another actor, Hannah Herzsprung, plays the protagonist's brother's wife, Helga Rath, in Babylon Berlin, while in Mackie Messer she plays a double role as Polly (in the visualized drama) and as actress Carola Neher (in real life 1929; lifespan 1900-1942).  Carola Neher appeared in multiple Brecht works.  Sadly, she was arrested by the Nazis as a Communist in 1936, surviving 6 years in political prisoner camps, dying of typhus in 1942.