 Starring: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Joel Grey, Helmut Griem
Director: Bob Fosse
Year Of Release: 1972
Plot: Shy Englishman Brian arrives in Berlin during the decadent inter-war Weimar Republic period and meets the flamboyant Kit-Kat Club cabaret singer, Sally Bowles. She falls for Brian, but both are then seduced by Max. However their free-wheeling life is threatened by the rise of Nazism, as well as Sally getting pregnant. |
Cabaret is a truly wonderful movie and one of my all time favourites. While the original Broadway stage version was a relatively traditional musical, with people bursting into song while going about their daily business, director Bob Fosse turned it into something far more conceptual on screen. Instead of the characters singing as part of the plot, we periodically segue into the Kit-Kat Club, where Sally Bowles or the all-singing Emcee sing a cabaret song that becomes a comment on what’s happening in the story. They’re almost like little fantasy sequences that add emotional impact and context to the drama going on between the characters and in Germany as a whole.
Fosse’s conceptual gamble could have been a disaster, but it works exceptionally well and showcases what is a far more complex plot than most musicals can manage (or course there’s also the wonderful songs). Both the music and drama add power and context to one another, allowing Cabaret to deal with incredibly complex issues and metaphor in an unusual and very potent way. It’s also been fairly influential. For example Rob Marshall did something similar with Chicago, although rather than having a Kit-Kat Club, he had all the songs taking place in Roxie’s mind.
Cabaret also has what I think is one of the all-time great scenes in movie history, which is when a blond Nazi Youth begins singing the anthemic Tomorrow Belongs To Me. Although it’s been mistaken for a real Nazi anthem, it was written by Kander and Ebb (who are both Jewish, and so unlikely to be big fans of Hitler) for the musical, and in the film it becomes a truly incredible moment.
Up until that song, it’s all largely been fun and games, with Sally and Brian flirting and being romanced by the rich Maximilian, but with Tomorrow Belong To me the movie reaches an abrupt tipping point and suddenly everything afterwards is infused with something sinister and an immense sense of foreboding.
The song is beautiful and soaring, using all the tricks in the musical book to create an anthem that gets your heart pulsing and you almost feel yourself wanting to join in, however intellectually you know the Nazi connotations, and so it makes the whole thing uncomfortable and slightly sinister. It’s a wonderful example of how you can use sound and images to create something complex, clever and thought-provoking in a way it’s difficult to do in any other medium but film. You feel the power and force of the Nazi movement sweeping over Germany, while you know the terrible things this will mean.
Cabaret is also responsible for a rather strange situation at the Oscars. Most of the time when it comes to the Academy Awards, there are rarely two truly great film in contentious, but in 1973 there were – Cabaret and The Godfather. The result was the rather backwards situation that while The Godfather walked off with the Best Picture Oscar, Cabaret won more awards overall. In fact it still holds the record for winning the most Oscars, eight of them, without picking up the Best Picture gong.
It means that while The Godfather is remembered as a great Oscar-winning classic, it actually only picked up a relatively meagre three awards, for Best Film, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. That’s the same amount of Oscars as Jurassic Park won, although admittedly the Godfather picked up statuettes in more important categories than the dinosaur movie. Cabaret meanwhile won Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Editing, and Best Original Song.
It does make you wonder how Cabaret can beat The Godfather in most categories, and yet the voters still went for the Mafia movie as Best Film (not that I’m saying it didn’t deserve to win). However that’s the rather strange and arbitrary world of the Oscars for you.
Interestingly The Godfather Part II actually won more Oscars than The Godfather, with six (both were nominated for 11).
There were also another a couple of other interesting anomalies at the 1973 Oscar ceremony that have little to do with anything above, but which are rather peculiar and so worth mentioning.
The Best Original Score award went to the Chaplin movie, Limelight, which is a particularly impressive achievement considering that while it won its Oscar in 1973, it was first released in 1952. The rules of the Oscars at the time stated that a film wasn’t eligible until it had played in a commercial cinema in Los Angeles for at least a week. Although Limelight had been shown in other parts of the US and around the world two decades before, it didn’t reach LA until 1972 and so only then became eligible for the Academy Awards for the first time. More impressive than that is that it actually managed to win one.
By that point Chaplin has been retired for 12 years, making it one of the Oscars most bizarre anomalies. Incidentally, while there are a few more rules now, to be eligible for most Oscars categories, a movie still has to play in a commercial cinema in LA for a week, which is why some films have very limited releases (often just in LA and New York) in late December, before expanding nationwide in January, so that they qualify for the Oscars, but have their main run in cinemas at the height of the awards season, when they are hopefully enjoying some buzz from nominations and wins.
In fact the 45th Academy Awards in 1973 must be the strangest in history, as it was also the ceremony where Marlon Brando refused to accept his Oscar for The Godfather and instead sent a Native American, Sacheen Littlefeather, onstage to protest Hollywood and America’s discrimination against the nation’s indigenous peoples (he particularly wanted to support the events at Wounded Knee, which were going on at the time, where American Indian activists had occupied the hamlet in protest at their treatment).
Brando gave her a lengthy speech to read (you can find the whole thing HERE), but she was only allowed to talk for 45 seconds and so never got to deliver the full thing onstage. She did later read the entire statement to the press though. It later turned out that despite her Apache dress, she wasn’t exactly a typical Native American, as she was actually a Californian actress (and former Miss American Vampire) who was born Marie Cruz but who had changed her name and claimed American Indian ancestry (although some say she isn’t Native American at all).
They don’t do Oscar ceremonies like that anymore (in fact sending someone onstage to accept an award on your behalf is now banned), and they rarely make films like Cabaret either.
And if you'd like to know more about what an interesting figure Cabaret director Bob Fosse is, read the Movie-A-Day entry on All The Jazz.
TIM ISAAC
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