Bob Fosse
Cabaret

Cabaret is unanimously considered the best example of a modern musical. While the success of the operation is not debated (it is one of the director and choreographer Fosse's most convincing works), the definition of musical appears more inappropriate: it could rather be defined as a drama with music, since the interludes - some of which have become famous, like "Money, Money, Money" or "Life Is A Cabaret" - are not sung by the protagonists but performed on the cabaret stage as "commentary" skits to the main story.

The substance of the film is the result of a complicated succession of sources. At the origin is Christopher Isherwood with his partially autobiographical debut novel, "Goodbye to Berlin", (like the protagonist Brian, Isherwood also had been an English teacher in the early Nazi-era Berlin). From the novel was derived a stage play by John van Druten, "I Am a Camera", which served as the basis for both the Henry Cornelius film "I Am a Camera" and a successful Broadway musical by Fred Ebb and John Kander.

Fosse's film is the cinematic adaptation of this musical, but it is built especially upon Isherwood's novel and the atmospheric historical setting it offered. The great merit of Cabaret lies in its skillful and nostalgic reconstruction of an unrepeatable era, where the refined and decadent entertainment of the cabaret conceals and at the same time reflects the creeping tensions destined to culminate in subsequent historical catastrophes.

The particular emotional tension of the film resides entirely on this contrast. In 1930s Berlin, around the character of the egocentric and reckless cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), revolve the fates of the shy intellectual Brian (Michael York), the frivolous aristocrat Max (Helmut Griem), and their friend Fritz (Fritz Wepper) who is in love with the Jewish Natalia (Marisa Berenson). Around their erotic and sentimental escapades - in particular, the love story between Sally and Brian, their relationships with the bisexual Max, Sally's pregnancy and the subsequent abortion - we witness in the background the slow rise to power of the Nazi party, underestimated by everyone as a bunch of fanatics "who will serve to clear out the subversives" but destined to become an increasingly pervasive presence in German society, as well exemplified in the scene where the seemingly innocent song of a young Nazi ("Tomorrow Belongs To Me") gradually transforms into a threatening battle chorus.

Berlin's cabaret, with its ballets full of ambiguity and eroticism, is a symbol of a licentious and opulent era destined to be swept away by disasters which in the film are shrewdly only hinted at. The musical numbers exude the unmistakable figurative universe, between expressionism and kitsch, of pre-Nazi Mitteleurope, reconstructed by Fosse with great adherence to the spirit of the time: these are the years of George Grosz and Max Reinhardt, of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, of Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich, of a culture that, in its often unsettling and macabre expressions, foreshadows the impending tragedy. Even the seemingly carefree entertainment of the cabaret reflects these ambiguities, embodied by the perverse mask of Joel Grey, the effeminate show presenter and protagonist of almost all the musical numbers.

The other great protagonist is Liza Minnelli, here in the role that gave her the maximum consecration. The ultimate product of American cinema's artistic lineage (her parents were Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland...) nearly dazzles with the explosive vitality of her performance, able to alternate comic and dramatic tones in harmony with the overall atmosphere of the film, and along with Joel Grey, was deservedly awarded the Oscar. The skill of Fosse's direction and the technical department (not to forget the cinematography by a master like Geoffrey Unsworth) earned the film another 6 Oscars and 3 Golden Globes, a great public success, and the uncontested status of a classic.