Divine Decadence, Indeed
For me, Cabaret occupies an honored spot atop a very short list of radically altered movie adaptations of Broadway
musicals (among them: Hair, Paint Your Wagon, and Bye Bye Birdie ) that succeed in being vastly superior to their source material.
Cabaret premiered on Broadway in 1966, a fact which always
catches me off guard somehow, given how its title song—performed ceaselessly
on TV variety shows during my youth—feels
as though it’s been around for at least as long as The Star-Spangled Banner. (A
sentiment no doubt contributing to my astonishment each time contemporary theater audiences
and revival house habitués still gasp and laugh in surprised amusement at the punchline
lyric, “She was the happiest corpse I’ve ever seen.”)
In 1966, the very same year Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity premiered on Broadway, the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb collaborated
with playwright Joe Masteroff on the Broadway musical Cabaret; a reshaped, bleaker version of Van Druten’s play that ultimately went on to win eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
Producers Cy Feuer & Martin Baum, rumored principally to only have been interested in Fosse for his musical staging, "settled" on the desperate-to-make-it-in films director by making it clear they were going to keep him on a tight rein. For instance, dictating casting (Minnelli and Grey were the producer's "Do it with them or don't do it," absolutes), vetoing Fosse's choice of cinematographer (Charity's Robert Surtees), and maintaining final edit of the film upon completion.
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| Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles |
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| Michael York as Brian Roberts |
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| Joel Grey as The Master of Ceremonies |
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| Marisa Berenson as Natalia Landauer |
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| Fritz Wepper as Fritz Wendel |
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| Helmut Griem as Baron Maximilian von Heune |
A significant part of the stylized naturalism Fosse brought
to Cabaret was the then-novel device
of framing all of the show’s musical numbers within the relatively “realistic” construct
of performance and source. This diegetic meant that whether it was incidental music emanating
from a Victrola (the fate of many of the excised songs from the stage
production), an anthem sung in a sunlit German beer garden (Tomorrow Belongs to Me), or the
tantalizingly tawdry musical performances staged within the smoky bowels of the
Kit Kat Klub; all the music in Cabaret
arose exclusively out of situations and sources consistent with real life.
And unless you were around in those grit &realism-fixated
days of '70s cinema, you have no idea how significant a role this played in Cabaret’s success. In the Hollywood of
the '70s, happy endings were passé, sentiment was old-fashioned, and disillusioned
cynicism was the clarion call of the true creative artist.
Fosse’s elephantine screen version of Sweet Charity, all zoom-lens razzle-dazzle while coyly skirting the
issue of Charity’s prostitution exemplified everything that no longer worked
in American movies. Not only did the “Tell it like it is” generation blanch at
the sight of characters bursting into song and dance in natural settings, but innocent,
waifish whores of the sort popularized by Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s were rendered quaint
clichés after Jane Fonda’s candid portrayal of a street-tough NY prostitute in
Klute (1971).
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| Material Girl Cabaret doesn't shy away from showing Sally's opportunistic side |
In keeping with that aspiration, Minnelli’s Sally Bowles is portrayed
as selfish, superficial, and brazenly comfortable about sleeping with anyone
she feels can advance her career. Similarly, the homosexuality of Isherwood’s
proxy character—hinted at in I Am a
Camera and thoroughly subverted in the stage musical—is at least depicted
as bisexuality in Cabaret (which, as
David Bowie, Elton John, and Madonna can all attest, is a great way of being daring
while still playing it fairly safe).
Shot on location in Munich and West Berlin, there’s very
little of what could be labeled “Hollywood” in the look and feel of Cabaret. Sure, Sally is wildly over-talented
for such a rundown dive, and Fosse’s choreography, while appropriately modest,
is far too snazzy for what one would expect from such an establishment; but this, to me, is quibbling. In every meaningful way, from the lived-in faces of the extras, the baggy
period clothing, the monstrous/beautiful fleshiness of the performers at the
Kit Kat Klub (all unshaved armpits and death-mask makeup); Cabaret’s aesthetics evoke stark realism more than artifice.
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| The look for the Kit Kat Klub sequences was inspired by the works of German Expressionists. here Fosse recreates Otto Dix's 1926, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden |
I’ve resisted summarizing the plot of Cabaret because, like that
of its Academy Award rival, The Godfather (both films tied for 10 nominations each, Cabaret winning 8 to The Godfather’s 3, still a heated bone of contention
among Godfather fans), I think its story is so well-known you’re bound to be familiar with it even if you’ve never even seen the film. But for the uninitiated, I invite you to read my plot summary
of I Am a Camera here, merely inserting a sexual relationship for Harris and Harvey’s platonic one, and a bisexual love triangle for the pair's bipartite friendship
with playboy Ron Randell.
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| Twosies Beats Onesies, But Nothing Beats Threes |
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
That Cabaret continues
to be regarded by many musical fans as more a drama with music than a full-on
musical is perhaps the best testament to the film’s seamless blending of the real
with the abstract. What I find fairly ingenious is how Fosse juxtaposes the
almost surreal, theatrical conceit of his Expressionistic vision of the Kit Kat
Klub and its creepily androgynous Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey, recreating his Tony Award-winning role and practically
oozing showbiz smarm)—commenting upon
and foreshadowing the events of the film—with
the fairly straightforward presentation of the dramatic scenes. Scenes rich in
the kind of depth of performance and characterization rarely associated with
musicals.
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| Self-made Siren, Sally Bowles All the world's a stage in Cabaret, where the harsh realities of life can incite the need for illusion and self-deception as strongly as the call of the footlights |
A familiar Fosse trope is to explore the close link between show business's innate falseness and the various subterfuges people employ in an effort to cope with the pain of facing reality. Cabaret's brilliance lies in the manner in which its “realistic” dramatic scenes—scenes populated with individuals caught up in various degrees of pretense, self-deception, and denial (Sally averts her eyes and changes the subject when confronted with scenes of Nazi violence)—are contrasted with the so-called “escapist” entertainment provided at the Kit Kat Klub. In this refuge of excess where you’re invited to “Leave your troubles outside,” the club’s ostensibly harmless musical numbers and theatrical diversions (mud wrestling, erotic shadow tableaus, etc.) in fact reveal themselves to be the nightmarish compliance to Germany’s encroaching fate.
At the end of the film when the Emcee says, "We have no troubles here. Here, life is beautiful!" there is no doubt that he's lying and that he knows it. But when Sally sings "Life is a cabaret, ol' chum!" —with tears in her eyes and a little too forcefully—I don't get the sense she believes what she's saying so much as she NEEDS to believe what she's saying. The song becomes, much like the story about her Ambassador father, an act of wishful thinking and willful self-deception. She sings not of a philosophy to live by, but a philosophy for survival.
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| The Face of Evil The decadent spirit of Cabaret's Emcee, a vacuous entity for whom evil is just sideshow fodder, can be found on today's hate-mongering Fox News, and in the bloviating buffoonery of Donald Trump |
PERFORMANCES
I’m not sure anyone familiar with the show-bizzy, Vegas-y Liza of today can appreciate what it was like seeing Liza Minnelli in Cabaret for the first time. Then we didn’t know that her
haircut, look, and indeed her entire screen persona was going to be her “act”
for the next forty years. Back in 1972, it was just Judy Garland’s gawky
daughter knocking our socks off with an alarmingly assured, powerhouse display of song, dance, and acting that was, regardless of one’s personal like or dislike of Liza herself, the
kind of a triple-threat, star-making turn the likes of which the laid-back New Hollywood of the '70s had never seen.
Cabaret rightfully catapulted the handsome and likable Michael York to stardom as well, his performance being sensitive and surprisingly forceful, given that with nary a song or musical interlude of his own, he manages to avoid being eclipsed by the luster of either Minnelli or Grey.
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| The first film I ever saw Michael York in was the film Something for Everyone (1970) starring Angela Lansbury. A black comedy that recalls Pier Pasolini's Teorema, in it York is again portraying a bisexual--albeit a far less ambivalent one. With Anthony Higgins. |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Ever the master of sinuous sleaze and burlesque flash, Bob Fosse's evocative choreography and staging (serving up debauched detachment or eager-to-please pathos with equal aplomb) is ideally suited to the Kurt Weill-inspired tunes of Kander & Ebb. Special credit to cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (Superman) whose versatile camera (it seems to be everywhere at once) achieves a choreographed virtuosity of its own.
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| Contemporary attempts to recreate Fosse's style often adopt a standard-issue notion of sexiness that's straight out of Frederick's of Hollywood. The best of Fosse's style employed blank-faced, dull-eyed dancers going through the rote, mechanized gyrations of bored sex workers. |
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| If Liza only did one number in her lifetime, Mein Herr would more than suffice. Although my own body aches just watching the contortions Fosse puts his dancers through, by the end of the number Liza has the audience in the palm of her hand. She's stupendous in this. |
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| The ballad, Maybe This Time was written for and introduced by singer/actress Kaye Ballard. Liza also sang the song on her debut 1964 album Liza! Liza!, and it was ultimately resurrected for Cabaret. |
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| The delightful duet, Money- highlighting two professionals at the top of their game |
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| Any doubts about Fosse's talents as a director were laid to rest with his unsettling staging of the song, Tomorrow Belongs to Me |
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| As Cabaret became Minnelli's signature song, and the look she devised for Sally Bowles became her personal style, the line between actress and character eventually disappeared. |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I'm a member of the camp that considers Cabaret to be a near-perfect musical. Near-perfect because I can't say I've ever much liked the fabricated, Oscar-bait sequence where Sally is stood up by her uncaring father. Not just because it reads like a page from Pookie Adams' diary in The Sterile Cuckoo, but because it feels like such an obvious ploy to give Sally vulnerability. Certainly, it's a catalyst for bringing Brian and Sally together, but with Minnelli oozing vulnerability from every pore, the scene always felt like the least truthful moment in the film. (Although when I was fourteen, the scene gave me waterworks...which clues you in on how far below the sentimentality belt the scene is aiming.)
That little gripe aside, Cabaret is what I call a "full meal" musical. A la carte musicals are musicals I enjoy for their separate elements: preferring the music to the script in one film, favoring the choreography and staging over the performances in another. Cabaret is a true rarity: a wholly satisfying musical with great songs, excellent performances, a dynamite script, brilliant choreography, and more than a few ideas up its sleeve.
Even after all these years, I'm amazed at how well it holds up. The word "classic" is bandied about pretty freely these days, too often meaning a film an audience has liked for all of eight or nine months. But Cabaret, in every facet of its execution, is the genuine article. A true one-of-a-kind, never to see the likes of this again in my lifetime, musical classic.
BONUS MATERIAL
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| Lisi With an S and Liza With a Z |
The iconic purple dress Sally Bowles wears as she sings the film's title song first made its appearance a year earlier on the body of Italian film star Virna Lisi in the 1971 French/Italian melodrama Love Me Strangely (aka A Strange Love Affair or ). The gown is not the work of Cabaret's Oscar-nominated costume designer Charlotte Flemming. When the dress was put up for auction in December of 2018, the catalog noted the label inside the dress read: Loris Azzaro, Paris.
The Italian designer was popular in the late '60s and designed fashions for men and women, and he had his own fragrance line. See Virna Lisi make her entrance in Un Beau Monstre HERE.
THE AUTOGRAPH FILE
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| Joel Grey - 1984 |
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| Liza Minnelli - 1977 |
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| Marisa Berenson - 1980 |
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| Michael York - 1980 |
