One of the most illuminating DVD releases of the year is Criterion’s new two-disc presentation of G.W. Pabst’s much contested 1931 film adaptation of “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”). When he took on the project, Pabst was adapting Berlin’s theatrical sensation of 1928, a sharp parody of John Gay’s 1728 parody, “The Beggar’s Opera,” by Bertolt Brecht (and his uncredited assistant Elizabeth Hauptmann), with music by Kurt Weill. The film was modestly successful in its day, and much admired by critics. Yet ever since Hitler banned it, three-quarters of a century ago, it has been impossible to see except in lifeless, washed-out prints with scratchy sound and grindhouse splices. Its reputation faded accordingly.

While Pabst’s other films of that period — “Pandora’s Box,” “Kameradschaft” — were successfully revived, “The Threepenny Opera” remained in a limbo of historical curiosities, valued chiefly for preserving Lotte Lenya’s fabled rendition of “Pirate Jenny.” The picture was often derided as murky or fogbound, and as a compromise; it was said to dilute and even betray Brecht, either because of censors or the director’s fastidiousness.

The new DVD, taken from a stunning 2006 German restoration, forces a reassessment. It instantly discredits the idea that Pabst sought to create Victorian realism with decorative mist; there is no fog whatsoever — not a wisp. The startling clarity of the image allows us to appreciate why filmgoers in 1931 acclaimed Fritz Arno Wagner’s expressively mobile cinematography. We can now enjoy the elaborately droll art direction (broadly artificial exteriors, filmed indoors, and crammed interiors that recall Ms. Havisham) by Andrej Andrejew.

The issue of fidelity to the text is more complicated, but with one very big exception, the ultimate decisions redound to Pabst’s credit.

The exception pertains to the score, nearly half of which was dropped — including most of the middle-act numbers: “Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” “Pimp’s Ballad,” “Polly’s Song.” One major character, Lucy, was also discarded, mandating the loss of “Jealousy Duet,” though Pabst and company might have tailored that number no less delectably for the remaining rivals, Polly (Carola Neher) and Jenny (Lenya). The lost songs rob the piece of Weill’s great music and some of Brecht’s finest verse.

Still, Pabst retained eight songs and used instrumental interpolations of two others. He improved on the play by changing the order of the four showstoppers, so that they build to a rousing climax. “Mack the Knife” (magnificently hissed and gargled by Ernst Busch’s street singer) opens and closes the story.

The film’s midsection is paced with the two declarations of feminine independence: Polly’s “The Barbara Song” (mistakenly identified as “Polly’s Song” in the DVD booklet) and “PirateJenny,” which is also sung by Polly in the play, but was assigned by Pabst to Lenya, whose Jenny sings it with dead eyes, as if her veins pumped iced water, except during the chorus, which she warbles like a bird. The song remained with Jenny in later stage revivals, in part because it makes more dramatic sense as a portent of Jenny’s revenge than as Polly’s wedding entertainment.

The “Cannon Song,” a merry recollection of imperialist adventurism at its most barbaric — indeed, cannibalistic — is saved for last and made all the more powerful for it. Which brings us to the big question: Is “The Threepenny Opera” Pabst blue ribbon or Brecht red banner? Brecht unsuccessfully sued the production, and sympathizers have assumed that he was protesting the undermining of his theatrical innovations and Marxist rhetoric.

Well, as Criterion’s many commentators (including Eric Bentley in a fine made-to-order documentary) point out with a choir-like harmony, this is plainly preposterous. Pabst was creating a movie, not a photographed stage play, so he had to find his own way to suggest Brecht’s epic artificiality and galvanizing didacticism. Pabst rejected placards to announce songs, but he had the street singer narrate brief transitions and underscored the fakery of the thing with sham backdrops, surreal lighting, snakelike camera movement, and stylized performances, chiefly by Rudolf Forster, whose Mack the Knife struts like a coiled muscle.

Brecht’s play cuts from Peachum’s establishment of beggars to Mackie’s marriage to Peachum’s daughter, Polly. Then it tracks Peachum’s revenge, which involves the corrupt police chief, Tiger Brown, and Brown’s daughter, Lucy, climaxing with Mack on the gallows. The hanging is miraculously averted by a last-minute pardon from the queen. Peachum reminds us that in real life the queen rarely intervenes and exhorts us to combat injustice.

In the film, Mack goes into hiding, entrusting his gang to Polly, who proves her mettle by buying a bank and dressing up the hooligans as board members — right out of “Little Caesar.” After a nearanarchic Coronation Day march by the beggars (a silent, gripping confrontation and pure cinema), a liberated Mack makes Tiger Brown and Peachum his partners. Thus the underground, big business, and the law collaborate to fleece the poor. Mack and Brown reminisce about the good old days, turning desert peoples into steak tartar, and the street singer resumes “Mack the Knife,” this time singing of people who live in the light or dark, as the common folk shuffle off into the shadows and fade to Fin.

The film’s ending is more powerful than that of the play, but the strange thing is, despite his protestations, Brecht himself wrote this ending in his rejected screen treatment. Pabst kept more faith with him than either man would ever acknowledge. In my view, the film improves on the play in other ways. I’ve seen two productions and heard cast albums of three others, and they all suffered from cloying, self-conscious attempts at irony and vulgarisms deemed daring, even as genuinely daring elements of the work were defanged.

The film deepens the material by adjusting its tone, not once but (at least) five times. By delaying our first encounter with Peachum, the first section is concerned exclusively with Mack’s silent courtship of Polly; the feeling is slow and ominous, with long tracking shots, strange angles, mirrored reflections, and portentous body language. The second section introduces Tiger Brown (Reinhold Schunzel: “You actually … caught a burglar?”) and concerns the wedding. This episode is played as comedy, combining familiar bits from burlesque, vaudeville, and Mack Sennett — bits as old as the hat that rises in surprise or the champagne cork mistaken for a gunshot. Nowhere is the marriage of high and low art better represented than in the wedding between Mack and Polly, complete with a nervous vicar, much of it proto-Beckett.

The third section introduces Peachum and the business of paupering — creating in others the unnatural desire to part with money. Peachum, as played by Fritz Rasp (interviewed at length in one of the disc’s supplements), has a whining, buzzsaw voice and a demeanor conveying the eternal vigilance of the hypocrite. The scene has a Langian efficiency, fast and objective. The fourth section details the paupers’ march with the cross-cutting and quiet buildup of a silent movie. The final section celebrates the happy ending in the thoroughly sterilized bank, shot close-up and with little movement — the better to let the song work its mischief.

Criterion also includes the French version of the film, shot by Pabst on the same sets on the same days. The print is gray and tinny, but watchable. Florelle is charming as Polly, but boulevardier Albert Prejean is strictly Mack the Butter Knife. Gaston Modot injects some life as Peachum, and Antonin Artaud hilariously overacts his one important line. It’s the same film, with none of the tension. Also included is a visual essay comparing the two versions, a photographic montage, and a solid commentary by David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler. According to Rasp, Hitler outlawed the film but accepted a copy as a 50th birthday gift. One imagines him in the bunker, humming “Mack the Knife” over and over and over.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”