Amazon.com Essential Video
Winner of eight Academy Awards, including Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), and Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey),
Cabaret would also have taken Best Picture if it hadn't been competing against
The Godfather as the most acclaimed film of 1972. (Francis Ford Coppola would have to wait two years before winning Best Director, for
The Godfather, Part II.) Brilliantly adapted from the acclaimed stage production, which was in turn inspired by Christopher Isherwood's
Berlin Stories and the play and movie
I Am a Camera, this remarkable musical turns the pre-war Berlin of 1931 into a sexually charged haven of decadence. Minnelli commands the screen as nightclub entertainer Sally Bowles, who radiantly goes on with the show as the Nazis rise to power, holding her many male admirers (including Michael York and Helmut Griem) at a distance that keeps her from having to bother with genuinely deep emotions. Joel Grey is the master of ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub who will guarantee a great show night after night as a way of staving off the inevitable effects of war and dictatorship. They're all living in a morally ambiguous vacuum of desperate anxiety, determined to keep up appearances as the real world--the world outside the comfortable sanctuary of the cabaret--prepares for the nightmarish chaos of war. Director-choreographer Fosse achieves a finely tuned combination of devastating drama and ebullient entertainment, and the result is one of the most substantial screen musicals ever made. The dual-layered Special Edition widescreen DVD includes an exclusive 25th-anniversary documentary,
Cabaret: A Legend in the Making, a 1972 promotional featurette, a photo gallery, production notes, the theatrical trailer, and more.
--Jeff Shannon
Review
Less a traditional musical than a drama featuring musical numbers, Cabaret is a beautiful, disturbing evocation of life in Germany during Hitler's rise to power. Using the Kit Kat Club's expertly choreographed routines to reflect the changes in German society, director Bob Fosse effectively shows us a glittering, illusory world, whose insular decadence starkly contrasts with the encroaching horror of reality. Sally Bowles exists at the heart of the turmoil, a conductor for the unrestrained, buoyant energy that both electrifies the club and stands to be threatened by what is going on in the world outside of it. Brash, shamelessly sexual, and bearing a self-assurance of enviable proportions, she is a perfectly flawed heroine, one of the most fully realized women incarnated on the page, stage, and screen. Liza Minnelli portrays her with the energy and blissful abandon that the character requires, turning in one of the best performances of her career. The sight of her performing in the Kit Kat Club, clad in a bowler, boots, and little else and making novel use of a chair, remains one of the screen's most iconic images. The focus on the relationships of the film's main characters, most notably that of Sally and Brian (played with gentle, almost poetic befuddlement by Michael York), perfectly juxtaposes the turbulence of private lives and public events. Sally's promiscuity, Brian's bisexuality, Maximilian's casual use of both characters, and the eventual acceptance of platonic friendship mirror the fortunes of a time and mentality whose mantra of pleasure would soon be forced to give way to one of pain. The best and most terrifying evocation of past debauchery and present "progression" towards a new, fascist ideal, is of course the Emcee. As played by an unforgettable Joel Grey, he occupies an existence somewhere between human and phantom, a cunning apparition who serves as a reminder of carnal delight and ideological oppression. Like the Emcee, Cabaret shows us both delight and oppression, providing a nuanced portrait of an era where the former was rapidly being eclipsed by the latter. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
DVD ~ Bob Fosse
DVD ~ Richard Attenborough
~ Cabaret
DVD ~ Jerome Robbins
