Cabaret
Directed by Bob Fosse
Running time: 2hrs4 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Helmut Griem, Michael York and Liza Minelli star in Cabaret
As someone who loves musicals — Broadway-based or Hollywood-born, operatically earnest or jazz-hands flashy — I’ve spent much of my life trying to convert loved ones who don’t, or least finding the films that serve as bridging points for those who shudder at the very thought of someone spontaneously bursting into song.
Time and again, Cabaret has come up trumps in that department, and not for any want of flamboyance or fabulosity on its part. “A musical for people who hate musicals” sounds like a backhanded claim at best, but Bob Fosse’s sensuous, velvety paean to glittery hedonism in fascist times earns it simply by being too heady, too potent, too fascinating to dismiss. Many of its musical numbers are bracketed in a seamy performance context, yes, which helps those allergic to the fundamental naturalism of the genre — but even when they leave the stage, they serve to evoke the heightened horror of events to come in late Weimar Germany.
Indeed, the film’s most contrived departure from credible reality is its greatest asset: Liza Minnelli, surely too polished and electric a performer ever to have wound up as the entertainment at Berlin’s sleazy, skeezy Kit Kat Club, but who cares? Appropriately enough, she’s a bolt of pure showbiz lightning in this story of decadence as distraction, segueing in a snap from the gaudy vaudeville of numbers like Mein Herr and the title number to the gutsy, heart-on-sleeve balladry of Maybe This Time. She’s a kook you care about, lending a glow of golly-gee warmth to the show’s darkest explorations of human cruelty and corruption.
It’s one of the great performances in musical cinema, thrusting a now-iconic pose every few minutes or so — thanks in so small part to the modern, angular swagger of Bob Fosse’s choreography and direction. It’s hard to believe it’s half a century since Cabaret first sashayed into cinemas: in look, sound and sensibility, it still feels fresh and daring, expanding the possibilities of what musicals can do and say at every turn, but also just razzle-dazzling with the best of them.
CABARET (1972) Written by Jay Presson Allen | Shot by Geoffrey Unsworth | Edited by David Bretherton
In cinemas now.