THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE 1969

“I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all of my students are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

The malignant propagandizing of fascism—where the authoritarian poses as the individualist, the lockstep conformist masquerades as the iconoclast, and emotionalism and opinion are favored over facts and information—is vividly dramatized in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel about the influence an eccentric teacher at a conservative all-girls school has on her impressionable students, was turned into a stage play by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (Marnie, Cabaret, Just Tell Me What You Want) in 1966. Set in Edinburgh, Scotland in the early 1930s, Allen’s straightforward, whittled-down play serves as the source of Ronald Neame’s exceptional 1969 film adaptation starring Maggie Smith in her Oscar-winning role.

Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie

Pamela Franklin as Sandy

Robert Stephens as Teddy Lloyd

Celia Johnson as Miss Mackay

Gordon Jackson as Gordon Lowther

Jean Brodie is a dedicated Junior-sector teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls who, while taking pride in cultivating fervent loyalty and compliance from her pupils (those deemed worthy of being among the elite members of her “Brodie set,” anyway), fancies herself a gifted shaper of minds and liberator of spirits. Refusing to allow herself to be labeled or stigmatized by the provincial mores of the day that would brand her a middle-aged spinster, Jean Brodie asserts that she is in her prime (“The moment one is born for”) and committed to having her students reap the benefits of such timely propinquity. 

Maintaining that the school’s orthodox curriculum promotes stagnation and the upholding of the status quo, the flamboyant Miss Brodie eschews traditional teaching methods, instead choosing to devote class time to waxing poetic on the topics of love, heroism, art, etiquette, and her romanticized fondness for the fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco.

Passionate to a fault, Brodie’s dictatorial side rears its head in her penchant for passing off personal opinions and subjective tastes as unassailable facts; hard and concrete “Brodie Laws” subtly enforced and stringently adhered-to lest one risk falling out of the revered teacher’s much-coveted favor. Dismissive of “team players,” “joiners” and any institution or individual failing to share her world view, Jean Brodie is quick to characterize all who criticize or disagree with her as “the opposition” or “enemy.” This disdain for critique of any sort inspiring Miss Brodie to deputize her pupils and have them act as her protectors and co-conspirators in defying her nemesis, the school’s stern headmistress Miss Mackay.

"Do any of you little girls remember what the followers of Mussolini are called?"
"Fascisti."
"That is correct! F-A-S-C-I-S-T-I."

The narcissistic, leapfrog self-dramatization necessary to lead one to interpret mere professional criticism as personal assault (“I shall remain in this education factory where my duty lies. If they want to get rid of me they will have to assassinate me!”) is precisely the sort grand, larger-than-life attitudinizing that the four girls who make up Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème pupils find so appealing. From her florid gestures and affected speech, to the colorful palette of her wardrobe; Miss Jean Brodie represents romance and daring to the supple young minds of the Brodie girls. The members of the Brodie set: dependable Sandy, beautiful Jenny, histrionic Monica, and hopeless Mary McGregor (every clique needs someone to pick on and and blame).

As is often the case with self-styled iconoclasts, setting oneself apart and drawing attention to oneself eventually become indistinguishable characteristics of the breed, adding perhaps, in the case of Miss Brodie, desirability. Miss Brodie may incur the gossip and resentment of Marcia Blaine’s female staff, but the male staff members are drawn to Miss Brodie like the proverbial moths to flame.
She remains the object of amorous obsession for ex-lover Teddy Lloyd, the school’s very married-with-children art teacher—his being a Catholic the single quality disqualifying him as a suitable lover ("How could a girl with a mind of her own have to do with a man who can't think for himself?" ). Gordon Lowther, the school's vocal coach, is the current lover in her life, but Miss Brodie treats him so much like a work-in-progress sociology assignment, the precocious Brodie girls come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that Miss Brodie (who they know loves artists like Giotto) feels genuine passion for Mr. Lloyd, but because he is married, is merely "working it off" with Mr. Lowther.

The Brodie Set
Pamela Franklin, Diane Grayson, Shirley Steedman, Jane Carr
Even in this shot one can see that Sandy will be the force to reckon with

While keeping her adult relationships at an arms-distance, those most susceptible to the magnetism of Miss Brodie’s bohemian spirit (the most naïve and unquestioning of her charge) are taken into her heart and confidence. So bound are they to her by devotion and admiration, they are blind to her manipulation. Miss Brodie, who looks upon life as a series of heroic experiences, romantic ideals, and lofty principles recklessly applied, is less concerned with the genuine education of the girls (it’s hinted that the Brodie girls, while cultured, come up rather short when it comes to basic academics) than she is committed to teaching them all about life…on her terms.

Setting herself apart and above as the example for the girls to follow, she preaches individualism (if Lewis Carroll’s The Red Queen’s “All ways are my ways” can be thought of as individualism) while stressing that she alone is the source of all truth, honesty, and trust. In the end, as the emergent Spanish Civil War inflames Miss Brodie’s ardency for the fascist Franco (the film takes the girls from 12 to 18-years-old), her impact of her heedless influence takes a dangerous and tragic turn.

In many ways, the charismatic but pernicious Jean Brodie suggests a dark-side variant on that beloved, if overworked, theatrical archetype: the garrulous, irrepressible, meddlesome, manipulative "open a new window" drag queen pied piper exemplified by Mame Dennis, Dolly Levi, and Mama Rose. The latter being plenty dark already.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of those remarkable films I fell in love with the first time I saw it. Which was approximately 15 years ago. I had the opportunity to see it during the time of its initial release, but in a year that saw the release of Sweet Charity, Midnight Cowboy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and The Sterile Cuckoo, my unfamiliarity with Maggie Smith coupled with the starchiness of that title (I can’t even say The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie without my spine spontaneously stiffening) kept me away. Also, being a rather hard sell, marketing wise, the film had a really lousy and misleading ad campaign. As to why I didn't see it in the intervening years, I confess that I assumed it to be one of those remote, inaccessible, British “prestige” pictures that the Academy loves to award with Oscars, so it wasn’t until I was in my 40s and it was broadcast on cable TV that I settled down to watch it. Immediately I knew I would have adored this film had I seen it as a youngster. Not long thereafter, I made a point of reading both the book and the play, I loved it that much.

Miss Brodie's Lovers / Mr. Lloyd
Maggie Smith and Robert Stephen were married at the time. They divorced in 1974

The chief attraction of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is simply the patent magnificence of Maggie Smith, after which comes the film’s sharp and witty screenplay and the top-grade performances delivered by the exceptionally well-cast ensemble. A beguiling balance of character-study, romantic drama, and wistful coming-of-age story, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is also a sobering contemplation on the often disarming face of power.

In profiling an authoritarian figure who presents herself as the instrument of change when in actuality she’s merely a tinpot despot intent on imposing a new dictatorial order (demanding loyalty, repudiating differing points of view, labeling criticism opposition), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is impossible to watch these days without drawing parallels with a certain faux-politician, fame-culture miscreant who-shall-not-be-named. Indeed, the film’s “insidious dangers of fascism” angle has never felt more prescient and relevant.

Miss Brodie's Lovers / Mr. Lowther
Gordon Jackson was married to Rona Anderson, the actress who played Miss Brodie's rival,
Miss Lockhart the chemistry teacher

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I suspect that director Ronald Neame’s early career as a cinematographer accounts for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’s lack of staginess. While interiors dominate, the film feels neither unduly static nor needlessly opened-up, the focus remaining on the relationships, conflicts, and interactions of the characters.

The scenes come in four varieties of cyclical vignettes spanning the girls’ introduction to Miss Brodie during the school’s Junior cycle (age 12 to 15) though to their Senior cycle (15 to 18). The vignettes: 1) Miss Brodie teaching, or, more accurately, inculcating. 2) Scenes depicting the Brodie girls, spurred by their teacher’s romantic fictions and dalliances, evincing an accelerated sexual and intellectual precocity. 3) Miss Brodie’s relationships with Mr. Lloyd (arm’s length) and Mr. Lowther (a project undertaken…like starting a garden). 4) Miss Brodie’s run-ins with the formidable Miss Mackay—intensely hostile, tour de force encounters that make Batman vs. Superman look like a game of jacks.

I personally like how subtly the passage of time is conveyed in the film, but critics have cited (and here they do have a point) that while the young girls make credible inroads to visible maturity over the course of the film’s five to six year time span, Maggie Smith looks exactly the same at the end of the film as she does at the beginning.

The entertaining forcefulness of Maggie Smith’s performance posits the flamboyant teacher—who remains front and center of the narrative even when she’s off-screen—as the preferred alternative to the rigidly dour Miss Mackay. (I’m reminded of The Trouble With Angels when Gypsy Rose Lee pops up as a glamorous dance instructor to the delight of the girls dominated by Rosalind Russell’s stern Mother Superior.)

Smith’s Jean Brodie is so attractive and appealing a personality that we scarcely notice—much less mind—when she exhibits troubling traits like romanticizing a dictator or attempting to orchestrate the seduction of one of her students by a man old enough to be her father. At these moments she seems more naïve and foolish than malicious, and we, like her students, side with her and feel she is an inspiring breath of fresh air.

But as the film progresses and we sense a lack of flexibility in Miss Brodie's point of view; a lack of generosity or kindness in her treatment of Sandy or Mary; when her self-centeredness reveals a disregard for the feelings of the men in her life; when it looks as though the influence she wields over the lives of the girls is really a need to control...there arrives the point of conflict. The film grows darker and we’re no longer quite as certain of whose side we’re on. Suddenly, Miss Brodie doesn't appear quite so harmless.

"She always looks so...extreme!"
Miss Brodie is sized up by members of the Marcia Blaine teaching staff

PERFORMANCES

The risk of portraying an individual who hides behind a façade of studied (and appealing) artifice is risky. If the artifice is more compelling than the individual, caricature can eclipse character. I’m not sure how she does it, but Maggie Smith, while indulging in some of the most humorously florid vocal and physical posturings imaginable, manages to paint a vivid and human portrait of a woman of boundless spirit and reckless bravado who lives her life without a single thing of substance to moor it to beyond the worshipful, too-impressionable girls trusted to her charge.

Depicting a woman channeling her prodigious energies in all directions at once, Smith miraculously conveys both the self-deception and desperation behind the ostentation designed to conceal what may be the truth that Miss Brodie works so hard to evade: that she is not, in fact, in her prime at all, and she knows it.

Mary McGregor (center), devoted to Miss Brodie to a fault, is the film's most poignant character

Miss Brodie's ill-informed, naive proselytizing, encouraging the impressionable to adopt beliefs and pursue risky endeavors which yield no consequences or danger to herself, can't help but remind me of  those selfish, privileged, bubble-protected celebrities who have much to say about political risk-taking and protest (Susan Sarandon comes to mind) while personally having absolutely nothing at stake.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Maggie Smith’s show, to be sure, but Celia Johnson is extraordinary (both to watch and listen to; her Scottish accent is pure, lilting music). Imagine, if you will, having to find an actress capable of posing a credible threat to the likes of Maggie Smith. On the strength of her facial expressions alone, Celia Johnson’s prim and provincial Miss Mackay is more than up to the job; her scenes with Smith providing the film with some of its most spirited, volcanic moments.

Miss Brodie: "My credo is 'Lift, enliven, stimulate!'"
Miss Mackay: "No doubt...."

But for my money, it is the assured, natural performance of the highly underrated Pamela Franklin (Our Mother's House, The Innocents) that serves to ground the comic/dramatic crescendos of Mmes Smith & Johnson. In portraying the character of Sandy, whose youthful impertinence is the genuine personification of the kind of  intellectual self-determination Miss Brodie professes to encourage in her girls, Pamela Franklin’s unshowy, utterly convincing transformation from inquisitive teen to disillusioned young woman (she was 18-years-old at the time) is one of the unsung miracles of an already outstanding film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY/REALITY

While satisfying my fondness for Maggie Smith performances and ‘60s movies set in schoolrooms (Up The Down Staircase, To Sir With Love), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is ultimately a subtle and shrewd polemic on the seductive, corrupting nature of power, and the ease with which people can relinquish their freedom when confronted with a forceful personality.

It’s clear to us from the start that Jean Brodie—with her strict guidelines for the proper height to open a window and dismissive attitude towards loyalties shown to anything or anyone but herself—is no champion of independent thought and critical thinking. For all her obvious professional dedication she is more an autocrat than a teacher, her self-serving politics rooted in nothing deeper than a deluded sense of her own importance.

"Benito Mussolini. Il Duce. Italy's leader supreme. A Roman worthy of his heritage.
The greatest Roman of them all."

Touting her own teaching methods as revolutionary while (inaccurately) promoting fascist regimes as drain-the-swamp implementers of a new world utopia; Miss Brodie, like all dictators, merely couches age-old totalitarian philosophies in the rhetoric of liberation.

Back in 1969 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie spoke to the anti-authoritarianism of the youth movement, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the anti-war movement. Today…well, I hardly have to say why a film about a fascist sympathizer being given a broad forum to spread misinformation is as relevant now as George Orwell’s 1984.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a film so good that it warrants a revisit on the strength of its performances and entertainment value alone. But taken as a cautionary tale for our times—a reiteration of the duty and necessity of resistance—I’d say that in this instance, a little time spent in the classroom of one Miss Jean Brodie would be time very well spent, indeed.

"I am the potter and you are my pride.
You are shaping up.
Soon you graduate to the senior school and I will no longer teach you
...but you will always be Brodie Girls."

BONUS MATERIAL

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was nominated for only two Oscars: Best Actress and Best Original Song. "Jean" is sung over the film's closing credits by composer Rod McKuen, but singer Oliver (who had a hit that same year with Hair's "Good Morning Starshine") had a #1 hit on the adult contemporary charts with his single version. Rod McKuen's “Jean” was performed by Lou Rawls on the Academy Awards broadcast, and lost to Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

Got Pamela Franklin's autograph in 1981 when she came to Crown Books on Sunset Blvd where I was employed. (she's married to Harvey Jason, hence the last name in parentheses at the end of her signature). In 1998 Franklin and her husband would open up a bookstore of their own on Sunset Blvd - Mystery Pier Books

Al Hirschfeld

Copyright © Ken Anderson

CABARET 1972

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.”)

Bob Fosse’s award-winning, by-now iconic 1972 movie adaptation is actually the fourth dramatization and second big-screen incarnation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 Berlin Stories. The characters and events of Isherwood’s two-volume autobiographical novel collection chronicling his experiences in 1930s Germany before the start of the Third Reich (Mr. Norris Changes Trains / Goodbye to Berlin) first served as the basis for John Van Druten’s non-musical stage play I Am a Camera. Four years later,  I Am a Camera was made into a somewhat defanged, poorly-received feature film (which is actually much better than its reputation) starring Julie Harris and Laurence Harvey.

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.

Come 1972, with the movie musical genre on life support from too many failed, bloated attempts to recreate the success of The Sound of Music and West Side Story, a film adaptation of Cabaret was green-lit with a modest budget ($6 million); no-name cast (while known in films, Minnelli and York were hardly considered stars at the time); and an on-probation director/choreographer. After the megabudget flop of his 1969 screen version of Sweet Charity, Bob Fosse was persona non grata in Hollywood. In fact, at the time Cabaret came to his attention, Fosse was set to direct the horror film Burnt Offerings, which Dan Curtis eventually helmed in 1976 with Karen Black and Oliver Reed.

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.

But while Cabaret's inception may have been a far cry from the auteurist ideal prompted by films in the '70s, the end result manages to look spectacularly like the creative result of Fosse's singular artistic vision. This is thanks, in large part to Allied Artists CEO, Emmanuel Wolf, one of the few in Fosse's corner from the outset, and one of the more influential creative visionaries helping to shape the final film. Working from a marvelous screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and an unbilled Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music), this Cabaret jettisons many songs, subplots, characters from the Broadway show, and in their place, employs a stylized naturalism and stark recreation of seedy, decadent Weimar-era Germany that is much more in keeping with the dark tone and themes of Isherwood’s original novels. 

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles

Michael York as Brian Roberts

Joel Grey as The Master of Ceremonies

Marisa Berenson as Natalia Landauer

Fritz Wepper as Fritz Wendel

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). 

Material Girl
Cabaret doesn't shy away from showing Sally's opportunistic side

Armed with a desire to make Cabaret “The first adult musical,” Fosse devoted himself to what many saw as the uglification of the material, but what he and the cast and crew knew to be the key to making the film work at all: authenticity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, out in the real world, Sally, Brian, and Fritz distract themselves to avoid facing the truth about what's happening to Germany. Meanwhile,  in the world of show biz and fantasy, the unctuous Emcee of the Kit Kat Klub actually adapts to and accepts the Nazi peril, using showbiz razzle-dazzle to mask the subversive menace lurking behind his racist (If You Could See Her Through My Eyes) and fascist (Tiller Girls) stage performances.

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.

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.

Although Cabaret was released in February of 1972, I only saw it after the September 10, 1972 broadcast of the iconic Minnelli/Fosse TV collaboration, Liza With a Z.  Two such flawless displays of performance virtuosity made Minnelli THE star of the moment, virtually assuring her the Oscar that year. And those who still engage in debate over how she could have won over Diana Ross' equally stupendous performance in Lady Sings the Blues, often forget that when it comes to getting caught up in the hype of the flavor-of-the-month, the Academy often displays all the objective discernment of a Comic-Con fanboy.

The story goes that Christopher Isherwood's only complaint about the many liberties taken with his novel in adapting Cabaret for the screen was in having his surrogate, Michael York, depicted as a bisexual. Declaring after a screening, "It's a goddamn lie! I've never slept with a woman in my life!" 
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.

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. 

Fosse gets standout performances from his entire cast, the screenplay affording each at least one moment to shine and emerge as a dimensional character. (The English lesson scene is a particular favorite, Berenson and Wepper being especially effective and ultimately, endearing.) Of course, Cabaret is unimaginable without the indelible contribution of Joel Grey, whose nameless Emcee is vulgarity personified. I have no idea what the role looked like on paper, back when he developed it on Broadway, but there is a clarity of intent to his performance that comes through even when we're not exactly sure who he is (it's like he exists only within the walls of the cabaret) or what he represents (I love that he seems to have some kind of sinister hold over Sally. That little whisper in her ear before she takes to the stage to perform Mein Herr, that gag-inducing backstage grope of her bosom).


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.

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. 

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.

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. 

The delightful duet, Money- highlighting two professionals at the top of their game 

Any doubts about Fosse's talents as a director were laid to rest with his unsettling
staging of the song, Tomorrow Belongs to Me 

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

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.

A couple of shots of early makeup and hairdo tests for Sally Bowles. Minnelli claims to have come up with the look for her character herself, drawing inspiration from 1920s femme fatales (l.to r.) Lia de Puti, Louise Brooks, and Louise Glaum.

I Am A Camera (1955) - Trailer

Something for Everyone (1970)

THE AUTOGRAPH FILE

Joel Grey - 1984

Liza Minnelli - 1977

Marisa Berenson - 1980

Michael York - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 -2015