Bob Fosse, “Cabaret” (1972)
Loosely based on a Broadway play and a 1950s film which in turn were based on two novellas by British writer Christopher Isherwood, “Cabaret” is a musical set in the dying days of Weimar Germany during which time the Nazis are steadily rising to popularity and power. On one level, it’s a film of a doomed romance between a reserved English teacher, Brian Roberts (Michael York), and vivacious American singer and cabaret performer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), a most unlikely pairing of two very different cultures and outlook. Brian has come to Berlin seeking a broader life than his sheltered upper middle class upbringing has given him so far. He goes to a boarding-house and meets there Sally who is also a boarder. Sally supports herself by performing at the Kit Kat Club which is presided over by the leering MC (Joel Grey). Their love develops against a backdrop of growing discrimination and violence against Jews and Communists by Nazi Party members and sympathisers but comes under strain from the couple’s differing personalities, peccadilloes and personal ambitions, and eventually they break up and depart.
A parallel sub-plot that involves Brian’s two English-language students, Fritz (Fritz Wepper) and Natalia (Marisa Berenson), is rather more interesting and touching: initially the two hold back from each other due to mutual misunderstanding, Natalia’s social station as a wealthy heiress and Fritz’s pretences. Natalia distrusts Fritz for being a non-Jewish gold-digger and impoverished Fritz pretends to be a Christian. The two do fall in love but hesitate to push their romance further due to mutual suspicion and the worsening political situation. Pushed by both Brian and Sally, Fritz and Natalia soon confess the truth to each other and marry. The film does not reveal whether they decide to stay in Germany or leave the country.
Along the way Sally and Brian meet a rich playboy Max (Helmut Griem) who lavishes luxury gifts on them and sweeps the couple, Sally in particular, off their feet. This part of the film where the couple spend a weekend with Max tells us rather more about the two and reveals the flaws in their characters that will lead to their break-up: Sally is easily seduced by wealth and glamour, especially when these push all her buttons on vulnerability and neediness for the parental love she never received; Brian is revealed as gay in spite of his romance with Sally. As he has already told her that three previous relationships with women have failed, we can take for granted that Sally, who has also had a series of failed relationships, will be left alone again.
The film is more notable for contrasting the world of the Kit Kat Club with its seediness and questionable values and all it represents of post-WW1 Europe and the Great Depression (retreating into escapism and fantasy from poverty and disillusionment with democracy), against the new world of Nazism and what it represents (another retreat into a different kind of fantasy in which the corrupt world of the Kit Kat Club and its denizens will be swept away and everything is made clean and pure in a different way). The old ways are gradually replaced by Nazism: initially characters in the film disdain the Nazis but the party insinuates itself into their loyalties and at the end of the film members of the National Socialists are sitting in the Kit Kat Club’s audience. A scene in a beer garden in which a Hitler Youth member sings to rousing applause from his audience persuades Max that his original perception that his plutocrat class will control the Nazis easily is wrong and that the Nazis themselves will control his class; consequently Max decides to flee the country altogether. Brian and Sally’s reactions to the rise of Nazi power are one indication that they can’t live together: Brian rails against the Nazis and is hit heavily while Sally’s position is to ignore them altogether. Fritz and Natalia try to live normally as a wedded couple but the incident with Natalia’s dog suggests the Nazis are coming for them as well and their fate will be much worse than the dog’s.
For a musical, there aren’t that many musical numbers and they are all sung by Grey and Minnelli. Three songs are memorable (Minnelli’s opening and closing numbers and “Money”) but the others are forgettable. The choreography and musical performances can be energetic and powerful. Grey acts as both MC to the Kit Kat Club and the film itself, and at times appears to shape events like a sinister joker demon. He is the best actor in the film: campy, jokey, accommodating yet sinister. York’s character is more of a foil to Minnelli’s Bowles and is rather bland and passive; Minnelli as Bowles is lovable though infuriating, a vulnerable and fragile girl-child wanting constant attention who exhausts everyone around her and ends up lonely all over again. She wants to be a Hollywood movie star but her nature will prevent her from fulfilling her dreams. Her character seems inconsistent – one moment she is as shallow as a teaspoon of water, the next moment she has surprising insight into how her relationship with Brian will pan out – but Minnelli takes on whatever flaws and oddities Bowles has and infuses them with her own brand of bravado. (The fact that Minnelli herself was a bit needy and also surprisingly mature, having taken care of her mother Judy Garland for most of her young life up to 1969, the year of Garland’s death, helped in this respect.) The characters of Fritz and Natalia are rather sketchy but their love seems more genuine and warm and one has the feeling that whatever comes their way, they will face it together though they may not survive.
Although Fosse does a very good job portraying German society of the time, the film offers very little insight into how Nazism attracted most German people and why they had so little faith in the Weimar Republic. The conflict between Sally and Brian, being a series of strange dalliances with odd bods like Max, does not sustain the film; the job of keeping the film together falls to the sub-plots of Fritz and Natalia’s romance and the rise of the Nazis. “Cabaret” boasts some fine acting and strong scenes but does not have a strong narrative or theme. Flight from reality as a secondary theme is present but underdeveloped.