Cabaret
Directed by Bob Fosse
Written by Jay Presson Allen from stories by Christopher Isherwood and the play by John Van Druten and musical book by Joe Masteroff
1972/US
IMDb page
Repeat viewing, Amazon Prime rental
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Sally: Does it really matter so long as you’re having fun?
Bob Fosse took a pretty good Broadway musical and elevated it to art that withstands the test of time. Fifty years from now I bet this will still look interesting as well as be entertaining.
Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) is a cabaret singer in 1931 Weimar Berlin at a time when Hitler’s Nazi Party was positioning itself to take over the Government. Sally, an American expat, thinks she is “divinely decadent” and maintains that persona but she is oblivious to what is going on around her and terribly naive when it comes to real decadence.
The Kit Kat Klub where Sally sings is a cesspool of real decadence. Its girlie show is vulgar and its Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) is positively devilish, growing increasingly crude and anti-Semitic as time goes on. Into this milieu comes Brian Roberts (Michael York) who hopes to support himself by teaching English while he completes his German studies. He is immediately befriended by Sally who makes it her mission to shock him at all times. She says she doesn’t mind that he’s not attracted to women but they end up sleeping together any way. Concurrently, Sally picks up a German playboy who ends up romancing both of them.
One of Michael’s students is wealthy and beautiful Jewess Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson). There is a fairly extensive subplot about her extremely complicated courtship by Michael’s friend Fritz Wendel.
The various numbers in the cabaret show parallel the growing Nazification of Germany. Sally and Michael are kind of innocents in hell. Will they have the savvy to get out?
I’ve seen the Broadway musical on stage a couple of times over the years and its soundtrack was on rotation at my house for several years. It’s good but the extensive rewrite and a brillliant production makes the film achieve a kind of perfection. And that perfection is attributable to the genius of Bob Fosse and the excellence of the film’s cast. I can’t argue with any of the many Oscars it won. Most highly recommended.
Cabaret won Oscars for Best Actress (Minnelli); Best Supporting Actor (Grey); Best Director; Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration; Best Sound; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring Original Song Score and/or Adaptation. It was nominated in the categories of Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. The film lost in those categories to The Godfather (1972). I’m looking forward to see how I feel about the Academy’s choices!.
