Cabaret (1972)
Directed by Bob Fosse

Film Review

One of the last great American film musicals, Cabaret has plenty to delight aficionados of the genre but it has much more to offer, including a strikingly evocative portrayal of Germany's descent into Fascism in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.  The debauchery exhibited by the lively cabaret scenes - cutaways from the main narrative, presided over by a grotesque clown-like master of ceremonies - vividly expresses the decadence of the period, a decadence that is as alluring as it is repulsive, a foul cesspit of moral turpitude from which would spring one of the most evil political regimes in human history.  As in Bernardo Bertolucci's Il Conformista (1970) and Luchino Visconti's Götterdämmerung (1969), Cabaret makes disturbing parallels between sexual and political decadence - the allure of Nazism becomes self-evident when we realise how easily human beings can be corrupted by the shallowest of earthly pleasures.
  
Cabaret is loosely based on a 1966 Broadway musical of the same title, created by John Kander and Fred Ebb.  Only a few of Kander and Ebb's musical numbers made it into the film - most were removed and a few were reworked.  Money, Money, the film's best known number (after its finale title number) was written especially for the film and later included in subsequent stagings of the musical play by popular demand.  The main sources of inspiration for the film are Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin and the play this engendered, I Am a Camera by John Van Druten.  It was the second film to be directed by Bob Fosse, a risky choice as his first film, the musical Sweet Charity (1969), had been a spectacular flop which very nearly bankrupted Universal Pictures.

Cabaret did for Liza Minnelli pretty well what The Wizard of Oz (1939) had done for her mother Judy Garland, establishing her international reputation as a singer and actress, both helping and hindering her subsequent career.   Having been turned down for the role of Sally Bowles in the Broadway production, Minnelli proves that she, and she alone, was born to play the part, bringing just the right mix of oozing sensuality and reckless naivety to the part, confident and fragile in equal measure.  Michael York's stiff but sincere Englishman is the perfect complement to Minnelli's capricious and shallow Sally - both characters are convincingly drawn and provide an affective prism through which we observe Germany's moral decline towards Fascism.  Joel Grey very nearly steals the film as the sinister but oddly alluring Master of Ceremonies in the sweaty cabaret scenes, brilliantly reprising his role from the original stage production of the musical.  Why is it so easy to glimpse the inhuman features of Adolf Hitler in the powdered, doll-like visage of Grey's leering Emcee as he bids us welcome and lures us into his realm of sin and mockery?

On its first release, Cabaret was a commercial and critical hit.  It cost six million dollars to make but took seven times that amount at the box office worldwide.  It also dominated the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony, where it received ten Oscar nominations, winning awards in eight categories that included Best Director, Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey), Best Score and Best Cinematography.  The film was also nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but lost out to the year's other notable hit, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.  Today, Cabaret is considered one of the finest of American film musicals, a product of that all too brief period in American moviemaking history when the auteurs, not the profit-hungry executives, were running the show.  Nowadays, sadly, all that seems to matter is that clinking clanking sound that makes the world go round: Money money money money money money... 

Cabaret may be set in a bygone era, but if offers a stark and bitter commentary on our own time, reminding us of mankind's fatal susceptibility to all that which is glossy and base.  The film's most chilling sequence is the one set in a sun-drenched beer garden, where a seemingly angelic youth sweetly sings what first sounds like a hymn to the beauty of nature.  It is the exact opposite to what we saw earlier in the seedy Berlin nightclub, a scene of exquisite purity and lyrical beauty.  Like the crowds of ordinary people gathered around the youth and who are moved to join in the chorus, we cannot resist being charmed by what we hear.  But the illusion is shattered in an instant when we hear the words "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" and the camera pans down to show that the youth is dressed in a Nazi uniform.  How easy it is for us to be seduced by false sentiment and flawed ideals, to be duped into seeing angels when devils stand before us.  We may jeer at Sally Bowles' capacity for self-delusion, but are we any better?  Was the Third Reich an aberration or the inevitable consequence of human craving for decadence in its most basic and deadliest manifestation?  The rictus-like smile of the demonic Emcee gives us the answer we would rather not know.

Film Synopsis

Berlin, 1931.  Sally Bowles is a feisty young American who performs a popular cabaret act at the Kit Kat Club, one of the city's hottest nightspots, although she dreams of one day becoming a successful film actress.  Her only true friend is Brian Roberts, an English academic who has just moved into her boarding house.  Whilst studying for his doctorate, Brian gives English lessons to Fritz Wendel, a gigolo who plans to seduce the wealthy Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer.  Sally and Brian have just embarked on an amorous relationship when both fall under the influence of the bisexual millionaire playboy Maximilian von Heune.  Meanwhile, the world around them is in a state of political flux.  Just as Sally cannot resist being drawn to wealth and hollow pleasures, so Germany gradually succumbs to the allure of Nazism...