Cabaret (1972)

Official trailer

Cabaret is Bob Fosse’s 1972 American musical adapting the 1966 Kander-and-Ebb stage musical, which itself adapted Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 Goodbye to Berlin stories through the John Van Druten play I Am a Camera.

The film depicts the relationship between cabaret performer Sally Bowles and visiting English academic Brian Roberts during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Liza Minnelli plays Sally Bowles. Michael York plays Brian Roberts. Joel Grey plays the Kit Kat Klub Master of Ceremonies. Helmut Griem plays Maximilian von Heune. Marisa Berenson plays Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer.

Fritz Wepper plays gigolo Fritz Wendel. Jay Presson Allen wrote the screenplay. Allied Artists and ABC Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 4.5 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 42 million dollars worldwide. The work won eight Academy Awards including Best Director for Fosse.

Cabaret thrills me and chills me in the same number, and I think it’s the smartest musical Hollywood made in the seventies. Fosse’s staging feels dangerous, Minnelli is a live wire, and the gaiety on that stage gets harder to enjoy as Berlin outside gets worse.

The film is the defining American film musical of the 1970s. The Fosse direction abandoned the conventional movie musical format that had dominated for decades. Songs occur only on the Kit Kat Klub stage as performance. Characters don’t break into song during dramatic scenes. The choreography reduces traditional kicklines and chorus formations to fragments of gesture and lit body parts. Minnelli’s performance defines her career and won Best Actress. Grey reprised his stage role for the Master of Ceremonies and won Best Supporting Actor.

The Nazi rise works as backdrop instead of direct subject. The result is the rare American musical that engages adult themes through formal innovation.

The Fosse Approach

Fosse separated the musical numbers from the dramatic scenes by confining them to the cabaret stage. The audience watches the Kit Kat Klub performances while the world outside collapses. The film allowed Fosse to use his choreographic vocabulary at full strength while keeping the dramatic scenes naturalistic. The bowler hats, the angled chairs, the broken postures all appear in the cabaret. The German streets stay free of them.

Keeping the songs on the stage is the choice I admire most in the whole film. Every number becomes a performance for an audience, and the world outside keeps closing in while they perform. The structural choice solved the perennial movie musical problem. Audiences had grown tired of characters breaking into song. The Sound of Music in 1965 had been the last major commercial success of the traditional form. Fosse showed that musical numbers could serve narrative purpose without violating realism. The film made the form viable again for adult audiences.

Minnelli as Sally

Minnelli plays Sally Bowles as a young American playing a sophisticated continental. The character is bad at her job at the Kit Kat Klub. Her singing exceeds the cabaret’s standards by a comic margin. Her performance of the title song explodes the scale the rest of the film has been working within. Minnelli plays Sally as someone who has decided to find Berlin glamorous regardless of the evidence.

Minnelli’s title song is where the film gets its 9 from me. She blows the roof off a room that doesn’t deserve her, and Sally’s tragedy is in that gap.

The role had been played as a fragile English socialite on stage by Jill Haworth and in earlier film adaptations by Julie Harris.

Minnelli’s American belt completely changes the character. Sally becomes a young woman performing decadence instead of embodying it. It supports the film’s larger argument that Weimar Berlin was a stage on which everyone was performing while pretending the audience would always remain.

Tomorrow Belongs to Me

The film’s central political sequence depicts a beautiful blonde boy in a beer garden singing what begins as a folk song. The camera pulls back to reveal his Hitler Youth uniform. Other young Germans join in. Old men keep their faces turned away. It’s the only musical number that doesn’t occur on the Kit Kat Klub stage. The exception is the point.

Fosse had spent the film teaching the audience that singing happens only on stage.

The folk song outside the cabaret breaks the rule that the rest of the film established. It tells the audience without saying it that the Nazi movement was the political force that escaped its performance frame and entered ordinary life. The lesson the film delivers without explanation works more powerfully than any speech could.

That beer garden scene frightens me more than most war movies do. It starts as a pretty song sung by a pretty boy, and by the time the uniform shows, the old men turning their faces away have already told you who’s going to let it happen.

Does Cabaret still hold up?

Cabaret gets a 9 from me because Fosse solved a problem the whole genre had given up on and used the solution to say something terrifying about Weimar Berlin. Minnelli made her career here and won Best Actress. The Nazi backdrop works by implication, and it’s scarier for it. If I have a quibble, it’s that I wanted even more of Joel Grey’s Master of Ceremonies. Anyone who cares about the American musical or Weimar Berlin should see it.

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