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.
© James Travers 2012
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.