The ending always made perfect sense to me. Macheath was the worst criminal in all of London, so quite naturally he was made a duke.
Movies ruined by “Happy Endings”.
Well, my escort ruined the climatic stomach-burster scene in Alien when she gave me a Happy En…
Oh, wait…never mind.
Boxing Helena
Would have been better if it wasn’t revealed to be a dream.
Exactly my reaction as well.
Yeah, a very tough call in the editing room for the filmmakers. I do think they did the right thing, but I also could see them pulling the plug after “I hope”. I still think that would be a happy ending, though, just not shown fully to us.
Reminds me of the ending of The Pirates of Penzance in which the pirates are revealed to all be “noblemen who have gone wrong” and therefore get forgiven. And married off to the Major General’s various daughters.
It is very silly, but at least the whole operetta is consistently silly.
The 1954 Animal Farm animated movie ends not with the famous “the animals looked from pig to man and from man to pig” bleakness but with Benjamin leading a triumphant rebellion against the pigs. This is probably something to do with the movie’s uncredited producers:
In her study of the CIA’s cold war culture-war Frances Stonor Saunders describes how the CIA covertly acquired the subsidiary rights to Animal Farm from Orwell’s second wife and widow Sonia.[2] The film was produced in England and released in 1954, the ending radically changed to predict the eventual overthrow of swine-human totalitarianism by the unquenchable forces of Western democracy. It was a wholly non-Orwellian happy ending.
This is the George Orwell movie I referred to above that at least one site claims is responsible for the story that there exists a “happy ending” version of 1984.
Wasn’t the original a happy ending? After all, he loved Big Brother.
“What I told you was true, Luke…from a certain point of view.”
There was a fun little movie I watched a while ago called Die in a Gunfight.
It is a modern-day take on Romeo and Juliet and there are gunfights at pivotal moments during which anyone could die.
The main character tells the audience quite clearly that he expects to die in a gunfight.
There is a gunfight at the end of the movie. The main character does not die in a gunfight.
On a similar note, there’s John Dies at the End, in which
John doesn’t die, at the end or at any other point.
If you want your title to tell the truth, watch Penn And Teller Get Killed(1989).
Or The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, where Liberty Vallance is shot, by a man.
I have never seen How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but it is my understanding that by the end of the film Stella does, in fact, reclaim her groove.
Technically only Penn got killed. Teller killed himself.
He still got killed, didn’t he?
Reported.
It’s two in the morning. I am not going to be drawn into a grammatical debate over the distinctions between Teller is killed and Teller gets killed.
The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot did… But if I understood the film correctly that’s not really the point.
TCMF-2L
But did the main character in Don’t be a Menace in South Central While Drinking Your Juice in The Hood manage to NOT be a menace to South Central while drinking his juice in the hood?