The mobile camera seems determined to explore every nook and cranny of this tall and curiously built environment, from the pier where the street singer (Ernst Busch) relates the tale of Mack the Knife, to the warehouse where Mackie marries Polly Peachum (Carola Neher) to the bordello that is home to Mackie’s spurned lover, Jenny (Lotte Lenya).  Mackie Messer is played by Rudolf Forster as a cold, solid block of a man, a pillar of malevolence who draws the innocent-seeming Polly to him with one magnetic look. Polly, of course, is no shrinking virgin but the daughter of London’s beggar king, Peachum, played by Weimar’s most creative interpreter of evil, Fritz Rasp.  As Tiger Brown, Mackie’s old buddy from the British Army and the current chief of the London police, Pabst cast Reinhold Schünzel, a writer-director whose 1933 “Viktor und Viktoria” was remade several times, most famously by Blake Edwards as “Victor Victoria” in 1982.  And yet it is Lenya, Weill’s wife and a member of the original stage cast, who most memorably embodies the piece’s bitterly cynical yet profoundly humanitarian spirit. Here she performs “Pirate Jenny,” that heart-wrenching ballad of lyrical revenge, standing motionless before a window as Pabst cuts in on her in three progressive close-ups, leaving her isolated and astonished by her own repressed cruelty.  The Criterion edition also includes the French-language version, “L’Opéra de Quat’Sous,” which Pabst filmed on the same sets, using largely the same shots but a French cast. The French version is not nearly as gripping, and not only because the music drifts toward operetta when sung in trained French voices. The casting of two conventionally attractive movie stars — Albert Préjean as Mackie, and Florelle as Polly Peachum — also strips away the hard, tawdry sexuality of the German version.  What’s missing, too, in this less well preserved, much softer and flatter print, is precisely the presence of Pabst’s imagined London. Detached from the more faintly registered backgrounds, unimplicated in the receding perspectives of Pabst’s compositions, these are simply actors standing in front of a set.  Here again is proof of what a fragile medium the movies are, and of how foolish it is for us to condescend to the perceived primitivism of a past that is largely a creation of our own neglect. (Criterion Collection, $39.95, not rated)  The celebrated exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman used to boast that “The Intruder” was the only one of the 55 films he directed to lose money. But in an interview on the new DVD that Buena Vista is releasing today, he laughingly, if reluctantly, admits that thanks to a 2001 home video release, the picture has finally tipped into profit.  As well it deserves to. For a director best known for horror films (“The Masque of the Red Death”) and motorcycle movies (“The Wild Angels”), this black-and-white social drama from 1962 is a fascinating departure. It’s a “problem picture” close in spirit to the early wave of American indies (“One Potato, Two Potato”; “Nothing but a Man”) that were starting to appear around the same time.  A young William Shatner plays the title character, Adam Cramer, a man without a past who appears in a small Southern town where the white citizens are still reeling under the recent imposition of school integration.  Adam appears at first like one of the “outside agitators” accused at the time of stirring up racial hatred, and so he is, though he is working the opposite side of the street. He moves through the little town, befriending its powerful and seducing its daughters, stirring up resentment against the handful of black teenagers who will soon be attending the formerly all-white high school. His motives, in the fine script by Charles Beaumont (based on his novel), are pure: ideology doesn’t concern him. His only interest is power.  Somewhere between making “Teenage Cave Man” (1958) and “Creature From the Haunted Sea” (1961), Mr. Corman had become a skilled filmmaker. “The Intruder” is full of magnificently staged scenes: a midnight rally where Adam whips a crowd into a murderous frenzy, a confrontation in a hotel room between Adam and a traveling pitchman (Leo Gordon) whose wife Adam has seduced, all shot with a scientifically precise concern with framing and camera movement.  You wonder, then, why this new transfer is presented “open frame,” without the matting that would have been used at the time to narrow the image to the more rectangular screen proportions we still use today. Purists will need to adjust the zoom feature on their televisions to find the proper aspect ratio, but “The Intruder” remains a powerful film and a tantalizing turning point.  If this little movie had made money, the world would have known a very different Roger Corman, with a wider collection of Oscars on his mantelpiece. As for me, I’m very happy with the one we have. (Buena Vista Home Entertainment, $19.99, PG-13)  KNOCKED UP Judd Apatow’s gynecological comedy pops out today in several flavors — R-rated and unrated, full frame and widescreen, single disc and “two disc collector’s edition,” standard and high definition — with prices ranging from $29.98 to $39.98. (Universal)  BLACK BOOK The Dutch director Paul Verhoeven brings his garter-belt sensibility to the story of a Jewish woman (Carice van Houten) who seduces a Gestapo chief (Sebastian Koch of “The Lives of Others”) in the name of the Resistance. (Sony, $29.95, R)  KING OF QUEENS: THE COMPLETE NINTH SEASON This popular situation comedy in its final season, complete on two discs. (Sony, $29.95, not rated)
New this week is G. W. Pabst’s 1931 film of “The 3 Penny Opera” and Roger Corman’s “The Intruder,” starring William Shatner.