Cabaret (1972)

You say you love Liza Minelli but it is her manic energy which makes the film hard to watch

There is so much to enjoy in that film.

The movie should be best remembered for Liza Minelli's hairdo which she still adheres to 52 years later.

I agree, OP. On paper I should love Cabaret and something about it has never worked for me, on screen or on stage.

OP - I think the problem is watching the whole movie. It's long and drags in parts. I really only enjoy watching the stage numbers, a few key scenes and some snippets. If I had the time and talent I would make a 30 minute re-edited version. I would call it "Cabaret... In Shnippetsh".

Meh!

How many other musicals made more than fifty years ago don't feel dated?

R5 I also think the problem is that it’s more of a snapshot of a few days here and a few days there without telling an entire story.

I agree it's too long. The first time I saw it, I gave up from Liza exhaustion; she was too much. On subsequent viewings, I came to the same conclusion as R5: It's better if viewed in snippets. The musical numbers are great stand-alones.

[quote]I gave up from Liza exhaustion

Tell me about it.

I prefer Isherwood's story.

Less singing, more depth.

I love it! The set pieces are fantastic, and the acting is almost always superb. I love Lisa when she's on the stage, but she seems miscast in other segments. It's an elegant movie about an ugly time.

I love it! The set pieces are fantastic, and the acting is almost always superb. I love Lisa when she's on the stage, but she seems miscast in other segments. It's an elegant movie about an ugly time.

I like the stage show much more than the movie. Better story and all of the glorious songs!

R3 - she has had other styles.

I thought Liza had less manic energy in "Cabaret" than in "The Sterile Cuckoo."

Very entertaining movie.

It was an incredible film -but it wasn't the Broadway musical. I missed the original songs and story.

No one but Liza could have played Sally Bowles.

If you enjoy Vincente Minnelli in heavy eye makeup singing and dancing in Greenwich Village in the 20s Cabaret is the movie for you.

It’s astonishing how contemporary and fresh so much of it feels, largely due to Fosse’s employment of then very avant garde cinematography and editing decisions. Then again, many credit him with veritably creating the entire MTV music video model with this film (and also All That Jazz). I do miss the multitude of cut songs from the stage version, but it undoubtedly works in an arguably more dynamic and compelling way, even 50 years later. A masterpiece.

I’m in the middle of watching it now. Recorded it off TCM via YouTube TV. I know I’ve seen it before, but I’m really not remembering much of it so far.

Good movie until they finish "Tomorrow Belongs to Me". Then you can just turn the show off.

Wasn't the main character supposed to be WH Auden?

An audenary Brit in 1930s Berlin.

[quote]I love Lisa when she's on the stage, but she seems miscast in other segments.

It's Liza with a Z, not Lisa with an S.

[quote]R3 The movie should be best remembered for Liza Minelli's hairdo which she still adheres to 52 years later.

HER hairdo?

[italic]Fuck you!

Yeah but Liza has a widow's peak.

Yesh, my father… he wash sho funny and schmart… the great Vinschente Minnelli… he shaid I schould have a, ya know, “look” for thish part in a Bob Fosshe film. He said two wordsh to me: “Louishe Brooksh”… and the resht ish hishtory..

"Cabaret" is one of the finest movie musicals ever made.

Liza was quite subdued as Sally Bowles.

R27, Ellie Snyder always reminded me of Louise Brooks.

Some movies should be viewed as people once viewed opera (and still do, in some European cities). Watch Cabaret in a social setting, with friends, and don't hesitate to go to the kitchen, the bar, the bathroom, outside for a smoke, into the guest room for a quickie, whatever. Just don't force yourself to be glued to the screen, rather watch what grabs you. So many movies become enjoyable in this way. All the ones that drag on but are otherwise colorful and filled with great performances.

R27, I think you mean MY hairdo, Lulu!

We're not supposed to LOVE anything during the Nazis, it's more about reveling in the characters' hedonism, their moments in the midst of the surrounding, impending holocaust. Fiddling while it burns, so to speak, and we observe with pathos, cannot help that, because we have the vantage point of history.

Watching Liza have a manic, coke fueled breakdown is at the core of her performing style.

And Joel isn't gay.

Michael York is bland. He makes the whole thing seem long and sleepy.

I love the more iconic songs but thought it otherwise a little bit meh until i saw it on stage and loved it, even the lesspr songs. I agree it is the Liza effect that make it (for me) a movie i don’t wish to revisit (except for the chilling Tomorrow Belongs to Me scene, i watch often on you tube when i am feeling politically lethargic).

I was young. I got a warm and fuzzy feeling and a hard-on when I heard this snippet of conversation:

Brian: Screw Maximilian!

Sally: I do.

Brian: So do I.

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" was dubbed by actor Mark Lambert, who originated the role of Henrik in A Little Night Music. He was married to Victoria Mallory, who played his stepmother, Anne. Victoria was also Young Heidi in the original cast of Follies!

Sally Bowels

This is and probably will always be my all-time-favorite movie (and I hate musicals, as a rule), so I'll thank you nit-pickers to leave it alone.

There. I said it.

It is narratively anticlimactic. It immerses you but doesn’t hook you. What is the character’s challenge?

Roxy Hart: get off for murder

Eliza Doolittle: pass as a Lady

Gypsy Rose Lee: prove that she was talented all along

Sally Bowles: ?

I never liked it either, OP. First saw it in 1972 with people who had seen the B’way show (loved it), and they couldn’t get into the film version. Tried to watch it again a few times since, still don’t like it.

[quote]Tried to watch it again a few times since, still don’t like it.

I've always loved this movie, but now I'm going to have to reevaluate my opinion. Thank you, DL contrarians, for opening my eyes!

r39 the line was originally “Fuck Max”. It was censored. Similar to Streisand’s line in The Owl and the Pussycat. Made a nonsense of both scenes v

Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things has a very vaguely defined challenge but it IS a challenge. That is why the audience empathizes with her absurd character.

Sally Bowles has no central challenge, and Michael York’s character has no central challenge. Observe the rise of Naziism. Okay, I’m observing. Remember the Julie Harris play adaptation of Farewell to Berlin was called “I Am a Camera.”

A dubious record Cabaret held for a very long time was “most Oscar nominations without winning Best Picture”. That record was surpassed by La La Land. A movie with the EXACT SAME PROBLEM. A male and female who are misfits in this strange world and don’t really fit in but there are no real stakes, nothing to hook you.

I said this on here when it lost the Oscar

La La Land would have won Best Picture if Emma Stone’s character found out she was pregnant the same day she received the offer that made her a star, and aborted Sebastian’s baby to achieve her dream.

NOW the movie has stakes.

1972 The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret...movies people clamored to see.

Thanks for your thoughts/observations on this film, OP. I totally agree with your assessment: this movie should have "worked" much better than it did.

My take, for what it's worth: The whole atmosphere felt like the 1970s, not the 1930s. I know they tried with the costumes, etc. but it still smacks of 1972; perhaps too many brilliant colors (?) I don't know, but I agree with you.

The threesome dance mad it plain what was happening with the slutty three, The shocked reaction to "I do" and "So do I' just didn't fit from either of them.

As for Fosse's shocking finale, he steals from himself several years after in the "All That Jazz" Air Rotica scene's finale.

As he uses it here for he first time I'd include it my rewatch it except it's stuck on the tail of half an hour of Lisa and Michael's tedious end of relationship.

Thinking only of the movie characters and not their real life counterparts I wonder how long it would take Sally to realize Berlin's future had no place for such an American artistic soul as herself. Or perhaps successfully adapt to the New Order with the help of "that man" from UFA.

R50 the reason is cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth

During the 1970s, gauzy cinematography came into vogue. Unsworth shot some if the gauziest films of the 1970s, including Murder on the Orient Express, Tess and Superman.

Another big cinematographer of the era, Vilmos Szigmond, also used the coat of Vaseline (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Deer Hunter, Close Encounters of Third Kind)

Don’t forget, this is the decade Mame was filmed.

R52 - Thanks for making coherent sense out of my gut-level rambling!

I will also point out that much of the public’s perception of how the 1930s should look on film has been shaped by Douglas Slocombe’s work on Indiana Jones.

If you can see this film in a theater. It is absolutely stunning. It is bright and crisp. Slocombe was a veteran of Ealing black and white pictures, he knew how to photograph the scene to evoke the cinematography of that era.

Subsequent films about the era usually adhere to crisp cinematography

John Seale’s Oscar winning photography for The English Patient

[quote]1972 The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret...movies people clamored to see.

I was clamoring to see What's up Doc, The Getaway, Lady Sings the Blues, The Heartbreak Kid and The Poseidon Adventure. Godfather too, Deliverance, sure. Not so much Cabaret. Oscar nominations does not equal excellence or enjoyment.

R54 & R55 - While I agree with your premise, the films that defined the public's view of the 1930s was Paper Moon and The Pianist.

"The whole atmosphere felt like the 1970s, not the 1930s." - Interesting point, r50. I can't really remember much of Cabaret, which I saw some years ago, but recently watched Just a Gigolo with David Bowie from 1978. I should say tried to watch, because it's fairly unwatchable.

The one thing that did strike me in Just a Gigolo, however, was the set and the clothes and the general physical material aspect, which did seem authentic to a degree, albeit a couple of degrees removed from the original. Which is exactly what it was for people in the 1970s - the 1930s were barely 40 years earlier, a much shorter period than the one which divides us from Cabaret and Just a Gigolo. The boarding house in Just a Gigolo is how I imagined the people making the film and in the film might have remembered their grandparents' living room. Some of the people in the movies were even around in the 1930s themselves, Dietrich, for example (who is sublime). Isherwood himself was still around when Cabaret was being made.

There was no colour film or photography in the 1930s, so we don't see that period "in colour", while people in the 1970s may even have had their own memories of the 1930s in the flesh so to speak.

I think the problem with Cabaret, however, what makes it not seem authentic is that it's at quite a remove from its original (early 1930s Berlin, Isherwood's books on early 1930s Berlin, the American musical, then the American film). Apparently Isherwood himself didn't like Cabaret the movie. I just watched a few clips, it seems to be trying too hard to capture what was in the process of becoming a mythologised interwar Berlin. The other problem is that it's based on a musical rather then on the books, and that limited the transition to film.

[quote]Not so much Cabaret.

Well. that was you.

Cabaret was the 4th highest grossing film of 1972. (source IMDb)

Oh please, there's a whole bunch of '30s films. Chinatown and The Sting, just to name a couple more.

R60 - Chinatown DID NOT capture the feel of the '30s - totally ersatz; The Sting ABSOLUTELY HIT THE MARK. Don't ask me why . . .

R60 Although depressing, Chinatown has a plot and you learn to care about the characters. The Sting is jolly good fun and can be rewatched again.

[quote]The whole atmosphere felt like the 1970s, not the 1930s.

And "Singin' in the Rain" looks like 1952, not the 1920s. And is considered perhaps the greatest film musical of all time.

And "The Sound of Music" looks like 1965.

And all those "Old West" Westerns that look like the 1950s and 60s.

The films were being made for a mass audience with popular tastes. Concessions will be made.

R63 doesn't, and never will, "get it".

How do you people know what the atmosphere felt like the 1930s? You know from movies. Then you complain about those movies.

[quote]the films that defined the public's view of the 1930s was Paper Moon and The Pianist.

How’s the meth addiction going?

R64 You obviously know little about Hollywood cinema.

[quote]While I agree with your premise, the films that defined the public's view of the 1930s was Paper Moon and The Pianist.

Oh c'mon...

Marissa was so beautiful in this.

I can't believe this fault-finding with a truly great movie musical. The sheer originality of it, the way the music was an organic element of the story instead of brushed on, how the Cabaret amplified decadence without exploiting it. "It gave decadence it's due". Do you realize how difficult that is? How crucial this is to this supposedly plotless movie and is the reason it ends with the Nazis INSIDE the Cabaret? Decadence has been corrupted, the show is truly over.

Sally Bowles had no character arc? Like uh, she shoulda got pregnant and aborted the baby or something. Funny that, because SHE DID. She chose the pursuit of stardom over husband and home.

You critics do not deserve this movie and probably haven't even seen it.

R12/13, how many times do we have to tell you?

The silliness of criticizing the film for: "the whole atmosphere felt like the 1970s, not the 1930s."

That is a long Hollywood and Broadway tradition. The object was not to faithfully recreate an era. Artistic license was made.

Cabaret was first and foremost a contemporary entertainment, not a historical documentary.

It was a film musical, based on a Broadway musical, that was based on a play, that was based on a novel. Whew!

This is what the 1966 Broadway musical looked like. It looked like...well...1966.

The play was also made into a film in 1955 with Julia Harris as Sally Bowles.

And guess what? It looked like 1955.

^ Julie Harris

^ never understood her “beauty”

Also it should be noted that Liza was horribly miscast.

Although we can't imagine the film without her, Isherwood describes the character this way:

"She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides"

Does that sound like Liza?

The girl that Sally was based on was 19 years old and was described this way:

"In my mind's eye, I can see her now in some dingy bar standing on a platform and singing so inaudibly that I could not hear her from the back of the room where I was discreetly seated."

But that's not the kind of character that's going to lead a great big Broadway musical. Kander&Ebb and Joe Masteroff had other ideas. No wonder Isherwood hated the film.

Yes, r76, that’s why there is the much lauded theory that a good Sally Bowles is a bad singing Sally Bowles and Liza was to “good” for the character. It is a difficult balance. My problem with Minelli was mostly the overacting.

I think Natasha Richardson stroke the perfect balance in this

If nothing else…the streams of light emanating from Liza’ green fingernails at the ending of “Maybe This Time” …

Eddie Redmayne Returns to Broadway as Emcee in ‘Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club NYC’

"Right this way, your table's waiting!" The iconic Kit Kat Club reopens its infamous doors with a splash, featuring Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin as the powerhouse duo, Emcee and Sally Bowles, in the immersive, brand-new production Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club NYC.

This production, which initially captivated audiences in London’s West End, stands out for its fresh take on the classic, directed for a second time by Rebecca Frecknall and designed by Tom Scutt. It's anticipated to be Broadway's must-see show of the year, with previews beginning April 1 and a grand opening gala on April 20.

It gave decadence *its* due.

Oh dearing myself.

Cabaret was one of the first "gown up" movies I ever saw. I was 12 when it came out and I didn't (at the time...) know I was a gayling - though I do remember Michael York piquing my interest. I liked the movie so much that I performed "Wilkommen" when I auditioned for the 8th grade talent show.

I made a small mistake at r58: there was colour film in the 1930s, although it was not always used. Gone with the Wind was made in the 1930s in colour, but it had the feel of the 1860s! Liza's own mother starred in another 1930s classic movie that was shot in colour.

Are y’all forgetting about Sally’s abortion?

[quote]Gone with the Wind was made in the 1930s in colour, but it had the feel of the 1860s!

What?

It had the feel of late 1930s Hollywood.

It is almost universally thought that Fosse’s film treatment is a huge improvement over the stage musical.

But it's just like the book, r85!

R85, the description of your photo reads:

[quote](Original Caption) An American family of 1860. A composite group (individual photographs of the members of the family combined into a montage).

In other words, that isn't a family portrait.

What a bunch of philistines. Please shut up and stop talking about Cabaret, probably one of the best and most culturally influential films ever made, let alone musical films. You people are nuts. You’re like the kind of idiots who buy purple ketchup. Just shut up.

R70, a movie based on a Broadway musical is not “original”

R90 = autism spectrum disorder

Liza as Sally Bowles became such an iconic look.

[quote]probably one of the best and most culturally influential films ever made

The movie and Liza made a big big impact.

[quote] a movie based on a Broadway musical is not “original”

I would say it was original if you use the definition that it was created directly and personally by a particular artist, Bob Fosse. And it felt original if you had seen every movie musical up to that point.

R76 - How did Isherwood feel about the film of I am a Camera? From memory Julie Harris sings in it but she is dubbed presumably because Julie Harris sang badly.

I Saw Him in a Café in Berlin

Music by Ralph Maria Siegel English lyrics by Paul Dehn Sung by Liselotte Malkowsky [Sally (Julie Harris) sings the song in her club act]

I just love this thread and especially all the detailed discussions of cinematography and era. Sometimes DL offers up a juicy reminder of why I come here

[quote]R47 Sally Bowles has no central challenge

It was an ABORTION. An ABORTION, Michael.

There would be no way, Michael, no way you could ever forgive me. Not with this musical comedy thing that’s been going on for two thousand years.

Another cinematographer who changed the perception of how the 30s looked was Gordon Willis

He had photographed the 40s in The Godfather, which very much had a 1970s look, but his 30s in Pennies from Heaven is radically different, evoking the warmth of depression-era Coca Cola advertisements

Like many other young gaylings in the audience, I was struck by the revelation between Brian and Maximilian. I also had a very... visceral reaction to actors Helmut Griem and Fritz Wepper (as well as Michael York). The film really was dazzling. It made Liza a total icon (gay and straight). But I still like the original stage version better.

And the Purple Rose of Cairo, which simultaneously had to evoke a word which was colorful but also bleak

I first saw Cabaret as a teen in the early 90s. It was my introduction to Liza. Loved it, loved the score the cinematography, set design. Everything. Great movie.

If you look at the German films from the late 20s and early 30s (Pandora's Box, The Blue Angel, M, Diary of a Lost Girl). it seems pretty clear that Fosse, Jurgen Kiebach, Charlotte Flemming, and Rolf Zehetbauer did their homework.

THANK you.

Pandora's Box is a silent movie, underlining the rapid changes in technology in the 40 years between the 1930s and 1970s. I'm not sure trying to imitate German expressionism gives a more "authentic" feel to Cabaret.

If you want a movie offering the real feel of the between wars Germany there is M.