Cabaret

Year: 1972 (USA)
Genre: Musical Drama/Musical Comedy
Directed: Bob Fosse
Stars: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey, Fritz Wepper, Marisa Berenson, Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel
Production: Allied Artist Pictures


There is an unwritten rule in musicals and specifically movie musicals. They have to be decadent. Especially in modern times everything from the themes to the set pieces have to be elaborate, abundant, clean, shiny and new; and why the hell not? No one really breaks out into song with a mood forming Greek chorus bellowing behind them. It only makes sense that if you’re going to be creating your own reality in song; you might as well go for broke.

Cabaret starts in the Berlin Kit Kat Club during the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) works and performs there clinging to a dream of discovery and eventual stardom. The Emcee (Joel Grey) invites us, the audience into her world where the attitudes towards booze and prurient pleasures are as loose as the women. In comes Brian (Michael York) an uptight British writer who is working towards his doctorate in Germany. He pays for his schooling and boardinghouse boudoir by teaching eager German heirs and heiresses English. The two meet as Brian is moving in and start a friendship that might just become a little something more.

Oh crap, the monkey can't remember her lines!

Cabaret is the granddaddy of modern movie musicals for very good reason. In addition to being topical and intricate, it’s also does decadence with originality and spontaneity. How odd then that the film isn’t strictly speaking a musical. The music is diegetic furthering the story largely through Joel Grey’s character. The songs inject the film’s themes with a macabre sense of humor yet no character sings who isn’t already doing it for a living. What results is a world very much its own entity yet functioning within an increasingly hostile reality.

There is also a subplot about two of Brian’s pupils falling in love and marrying in an unabashed Jewish ceremony yet the principle story revolves around Sally and Brian’s unconventional romance. Themes like poverty, the rise of Nazism, homosexuality, poly-amorous love and freedom of artistic expression all run amok creating a sense of frenzied fatalism. Yet that fatalism is choreographed with panache and seduction that is impossible to resist.

If there are any noted faults in Cabaret they stem from director Bob Fosse. He may have won the Academy Award for Best Direction, beating out Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather (1972) but I couldn’t help but feeling slighted by his hawkeyed style. Fosse he makes the mistake of keeping the camera at mid-range one too many times. It parades by the sidelines of the Kit Kat Club stage but never meanders on stage for too long. Fosse should have taken some cues from famed director and choreographer Busby Berkeley, making the camera a participant in the choreography. You compare the famed “Life is a Cabaret” to “By a Waterfall” from Footlight Parade (1933) and you’ll see what I mean.

Better yet, I'll compare them for you

Still you got to give Cabaret credit for ushering in a new generation of American musicals; a generation more jaded and cynical yet still looking for a good time. Without Cabaret there would have been no Sweeney Todd (2007), Hairspray (2007) or Chicago (2002), which incidentally Fosse directed for the stage. Provocative, sensual and surprisingly relevant, Cabaret deserves it’s stature as a gold standard for musicals. I just prey filmmakers don’t take that legacy and do this with it…

Too late

Final Grade: C+