When Cabaret premiered in February 1972, there was little to suggest this film would come to redefine its stage musical source material (written by John Kander and Fred Ebb) as well as film musicals as a whole.
Cabaret was directed by Bob Fosse and starred Liza Minnelli, both stage performers with no glowing film credits. Cabaret garnered ten nominations and eight wins at the 1973 Academy Awards. While losing Best Picture to The Godfather, it won Best Director, Actress, Supporting Actor (for Joel Grey as the Emcee), and a host of design and technical statuettes. It is the film most decorated by the Academy without winning the biggest prize. Cabaret restyled film choreography, introduced arguably three iconic performances (as the Christopher Isherwood stand-in Brian, Michael York plays in a more subdued yet no less powerful register), and in 2022 remains both dazzling and quietly devastating.
When Cabaret premiered, the world was not even thirty years past the horrors of World War Two. It was barely forty from the heady, hedonistic nightlife entertainment setting brought to life by Fosse, Minnelli, and Grey, a scene also memorialised by Isherwood in his dual novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin. The musical’s events and its heady nocturnal world come to life a decade and a half after an influenza pandemic killed 50 million. Its end comes a decade before a further 42 million die in World War Two. While the Nazi’s primary victims in genocide were Jews (like Brian’s student and Sally’s friend Natalia Landauer), so-called ‘asocials’ including LGBT+ people and prostitutes were additional targets. The implications are strong; the gender-bending Emcee, Brian’s (explicitly discussed, if never shown) bisexuality and the Kit Kat Club’s dancers’ occupations put them in line for annihilation.
Watching Cabaret in 2022, the film’s acrid knowingness feels prescient for the present day as well as demonstrating a tragic awareness of the past. The immense income inequalities which engender the pre-WWII fascist rise are once again at play, not to mention populist, xenophobic leaders on the rise globally. In the UK, the ‘gender critical’ movement spews anti-trans hatred, leading to an increase in hate crimes and international condemnation. And all the while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage worldwide healthcare systems. Can we innocently fall into indulgent, immoderate pleasure-seeking akin to Berlin’s underground cabaret scene from the 1930s? Can we forgive the blindness to inequality, hatred, and scapegoating that result from the angry and hungry desperately clinging to any notion of safety? And can we bravely, honestly write about those swept aside or brutally crushed in the process? As well as serious questions we should be asking ourselves today, it is a set of dilemmas that Cabaret confronts with a still unrivaled emotional poignancy.
As the brash, bawdy cast of the Kit Kat Club perform against encroaching fascistic horrors they cannot yet imagine, it is hard to taste the wine and hear the band along with them. But Fosse, Grey, and company are intent that we do—we must, for life is short, and the horrors make the escape all the more necessary. But in the film’s most chilling scene, Brian and Maximilian von Heune (both his and Sally’s lover) stop for a drink in a biergarten where a Nazi Youth sings of the glories of nature and social unity, without mentioning the exclusion such ideology entails. It quickly takes over the small crowd, only the travelling pair and an old man sitting silent and disquieted.
Yet Cabaret’s political bite would be nothing without its understated, aching soul. The boisterous and bold Sally should be the worst boarding house mate for quiet, proper Brian (both hopeful and cynical in his bisexuality), yet they form an unlikely alliance in trying to sing and write their way to success when putting food on the table is barely a possibility. Sally falls pregnant without knowing who the father is—announcing her plight loudly in a library—and after some reflection Brian agrees to marry her and take her back to England. They dance, drunk, half-naked and merry, toasting “to you, and the baby.” Except Sally cannot give up her freedom and dreams, while Brian cannot expect them both to live honestly. Sally sells her fur coat for the abortion that will release them both, sending Brian back to England and safety.
Minnelli’s rendition of the titular eleventh-hour number has become definitive. Those playing Sally on stage today often veer towards drunk and angry interpretations, stumbling through the song with the futile rage of failure. Considering all that led to this point, the reading makes sense. But Minnelli’s Sally is ebullient, banishing melancholy with the same smile she invites her own destruction. She has cast her lot with Berlin, and with a woman whose story she tells to the gathered crowd: the story of Elsie.
Elsie is the strange, sad heart of Sally’s life, the unseen (perhaps imaginary) friend eulogised into myth. To Sally, there is no one who lived better or more fully, even if briefly. And for a girl with her means, perhaps she has a terrible point. “Start by admitting from cradle to tomb, it isn’t that long a stay” Sally belts the bombastic conclusion. Life is a cabaret, and she has no choice but to sing to her and her adoptive country’s doom.
York’s performance is perhaps the overlooked gem of the film, settling quietly behind Minnelli’s and Grey’s scenery-chewing without dulling Brian’s spark. But Minnelli finds her own depth and nuance as Sally wrestles with planning a future and finds she cannot. Whether Sally and Brian’s is a love story, or a friendship soured and exalted by romance, it still feels like a paean to missed yet unforgettable opportunities.
In the mirror that finishes Cabaret, Fosse and Grey’s Emcee turn their gaze on the Kit Kat Club’s audience, now overwhelmingly sporting swastika armbands. In a way, their camera is turned back across the screen to five decades of viewers grappling with their own complicity, spectators in the same ruin. It is easy to say that they should have known better; it is harder to dissent in discomfort. Fifty years after the film’s release, and ninety after Brian’s train pulled into the Hauptbahnhof, Cabaret remains poignant in its depiction of lost chances and fleeting connections. It also remains a stark warning of complacency, an anti-fascist ode, and a prayer of grace for times and peoples lost.
Words by Carmen Paddock
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