Cabaret (Allied Artists Pictures, ABC Pictures, Feuer-Martin Productions, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 6:45 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies for the second of a two-film tribute to Liza Minnelli. The first film was Arthur, which my husband Charles and I watched ages ago on a VHS tape I’d made from TCM, and by chance we watched it the night after we’d seen the 1931 film Sidewalks of New York, which had basically the same plot: an hereditarily rich kid (Buster Keaton in Sidewalks, Dudley Moore in Arthur) lives a socially irresponsible existence and is bailed out of his womanizing and alcoholism by his butler (Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards in Sidewalks, John Gielgud in Arthur). The big difference is that Sidewalks was made on the cusp of Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency and Arthur on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s, and the Zeitgeist difference was symbolized by the fact that the moral redemption of Keaton’s character is depicted by him doing something socially responsible with his fortune (opening a recreational center for at-risk youths), while Moore’s character does no such thing. The second film with Liza Minnelli TCM showed last night was her star-making role as Sally Bowles in the 1972 musical Cabaret, the screen adaptation of the Joe Masterson/Howard Kander/Fred Ebb musical based on I Am a Camera, John Van Druten’s play based on Christopher Isherwood’s stories of his early adulthood in late Weimar-era Berlin, which he left and returned to England just as the Nazis were coming to power. The film was scripted by Jay Presson Allen (also the writer Alfred Hitchcock brought onto Marnie after he decided he needed a woman to write for the title character) and stunningly directed by Bob Fosse. It’s the second of Fosse’s five films as full director – though before that he’d done musical numbers for other movies, including Damn Yankees, in which he directed his wife, Gwen Verdon, in her stunning “Whatever Lola Wants” number. (I remember watching Damn Yankees with my then-girlfriend Cat Ortiz, and she heard Verdon sing the song in her rather scratchy voice and wondered, “Why did she ever get cast in this movie?” Then she did her dance, and Cat said, “That’s why.”)

All five of Fosse’s movies – Sweet Charity (a musical version of Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria in which Fosse was forced to cast Shirley MacLaine as star instead of Verdon, who’d played the part on stage), Cabaret, Lenny, the overrated All That Jazz and the highly underrated Star 80 – are about the sordid underbelly of the entertainment industry and the struggle of people to make it into stardom. I hadn’t seen Cabaret in many years and I’d forgotten how good it is and how beautifully Fosse and Allen balanced the multiple elements of the story. Sally Bowles is the featured performer at the Kit Kat Klub, a cabaret in downtown Berlin in the early 1930’s, and she’s desperately trying to land a part in the movie industry and is willing to sleep with whomever she has to in order to do it. The film’s script name-checks Lya de Putti, a major star in the German film industry at the time (in 1926 she starred in an adaptation of Manon Lescaut in which an even more legendary star, Marlene Dietrich, had a supporting role as an up-and-comer). By chance I saw Cabaret for the first time in its initial release at the same time I first saw Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, a film about the Weimar-era German cabaret scene made while it was still going on and the movie that made Dietrich a star, and in my head the two films have been linked ever since. The plot starts when a young British man named Brian Roberts (Michael York), playing the character Isherwood based on himself, comes to Berlin to work as an English-as-a-second-language teacher to German students. (Ironically, the male lead of The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings, also played a character who worked as an ESL teacher in a German high school. Jannings was free to make The Blue Angel because, after promoting him as “The World’s Greatest Actor” and giving him four major films, Paramount in the U.S. had fired him because they didn’t think his strong German accent would work in English-language sound films. So I’ve long suspected there was a “So there!” aspect of Jannings having himself cast as an English teacher: “I do know how to speak English, damnit!”)

The sexually liberated Sally lends Brian her room for his English classes – his room in the same building is too small – and makes a pass at Brian, who rather shame-facedly explains that he’s never been sexually attracted to women, though he’s gone through the motions three times with mutually unsatisfying results. (This wasn’t the first time the young Michael York had played a Bisexual; he’d done so three years earlier in a marvelously kinky film called Something for Everyone, in which he ingratiates himself into a Swiss aristocratic family by sexually servicing both the mother and the Queer son – until the daughter takes over and demands that he marry her in an ending very much like the comeuppance Sammy Glick gets at the end of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?) Eventually Sally does manage to seduce Brian, though she also attracts the attention of a young, hunky German aristocrat named Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem). Sally is singing Max’s praises to Brian and he says, “Screw Max!” “I do!,” says Sally – and Brian rather shame-facedly says, “So do I.” (The ABC TV network co-produced this film with Allied Artists, what was left of Monogram in the early 1970’s, but when they first showed this on TV they deleted this scene and all other references to Brian being Gay.) Also in the dramatis personae are hapless would-be gigolo Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) and Jewish department-store heiress Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), who meet at one of Brian’s English classes and are romantically attracted to each other, only their relationship founders not only on his concern that she and her parents will think he’s only after their money but because he’s a clandestine Jew himself. Ultimately he comes out to her as a Jew and they’re married in a synagogue on the eve of the Nazi takeover, and we find ourselves hoping that she and her family can get out of Germany in time to be spared the horrors of Nazi rule, including the Holocaust, and preferably with the Landauer fortune intact.

Fosse and Allen carefully keep the Nazi terror to the edges of the film, showing Nazi and Communist posters each vandalized by the other side, and in one scene Brian runs into two Nazi newsboys hawking the Völkischer Beobachter (the Nazi paper that was their main propaganda outlet before they took power), confronts them and gets beaten up for his pains. (We don’t get to see the actual beating, just his arm bandaged when he returns to Sally after the incident, in a welcome bit of Fossean understatement.) There’s also a chilling scene in which a crowd of Hitler Youth, led by a young man of almost unearthly beauty named Mark Lambert, sings a song called “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” as part of an impromptu Nazi street rally. He looks like he just stepped out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will and the scene is an interesting and economical way of showing the Nazi menace without going overboard. Ultimately the Nazis take over Germany and the shows at the Kit Kat Klub continue, though without much of the satirical “edge” they’d had before (dramatized in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” in which the Kit Kat Klub MC – played by Joel Gray, the only member of the original Broadway cast who repeated their role on film – sings a love song to a woman dressed as an ape, and the punch line is, “If you could see her through my eyes/She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”). This is actually historically accurate; the Nazis allowed much of the German cabaret scene to continue, largely because their Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, realized (as his counterparts in the Soviet Union didn’t) that allowing the people to have innocuous light entertainment actually bolstered the regime because it was innocuous light entertainment and thereby gave the people an outlet for their discontents in ways that wouldn’t threaten the regime.

Bob Fosse made one decision about the film that in some ways strengthened the film and in other ways cheapened it: he decided that there would be no musical numbers except for the ones at the cabaret itself, when the singers in the cast (mostly Minnelli and Gray) would be performing as part of their act. Fosse said he didn’t like the obvious artificiality of people suddenly breaking into song and dance in scenes of ordinary life (ironically, two of the key people establishing that convention had been Liza Minnelli’s parents, director Vincente Minnelli and star Judy Garland, in their 1944 joint masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis). The up side of this is that, ironically, it returned Cabaret to the style of the earliest movie musicals, which had all been about people who sang and danced for a living and showed them singing and dancing only when their characters were doing so professionally. The down side is that it vastly shrank the part of Sally’s and Brian’s landlady, Fräulein Schneider (Elizabeth Neumann-Viertel), who in the original stage version had been played by Lotte Lenya (Kurt Weill’s widow and a living link to the original German cabaret scene; she’d been a homeless woman working as a busker when Weill met her, got her jobs in cabarets, ultimately cast her as Lucy in The Threepenny Opera in its 1928 premiere and married her) and had had four songs, including “So What!” (which Liza Minnelli stunningly revived in a 1980’s PBS concert special) and “Married” (a remarkable song which I used in the mix CD I gave people who attended Charles’ and my wedding).

One of the most memorable things about Cabaret the movie is that it finally got Liza Minnelli out of the long shadow of Judy Garland and established her as a persona and an entertainer in her own right – though her two big numbers, “Maybe This Time” and the “Life Is a Cabaret” finale, do show her mom’s influence. It helped that Cabaret was a story that her mom neither could nor would have been able to do under the Production Code, and she won an Academy Award for it – though TCM host Ben Mankiewicz’s claim that Judy Garland never won an Oscar isn’t quite true: she won the juvenile Academy Award in 1940 for her performance in The Wizard of Oz. (The juvenile Oscar was two-thirds the size of the full one – 12 inches tall instead of 18 – and it was given for a few years in the late 1930’s after the explosive success of Shirley Temple had made child actors a hot property in Hollywood. Mickey Rooney had won it for Boys Town the year before, and the year of The Wizard of Oz Rooney was nominated for the full Academy Award for his performance opposite Garland in Babes in Arms.) One of the most interesting anecdotes about Cabaret is that when she signed for the role Liza Minnelli had planned to pattern her performance after Marlene Dietrich – until she talked it over with her dad, and he said, “There were other women entertainers in Germany besides Dietrich.” “Like who?” Liza said. “Louise Brooks,” Vincente Minnelli told his daughter – and when she saw the film Pandora’s Box, which started the American-born Brooks as the “earth spirit” and prototype femme fatale Lulu, Liza decided to base her Sally Bowles on Brooks and have her hair black and cut in the famous helmet-like Brooks bob.

One person who didn’t like the film Cabaret was, ironically, Christopher Isherwood, the author of the stories on which it had been based. He didn’t like the way the film intimated that his character would be straight at the end – Isherwood lived most of his life as a relatively open Gay man – and he also didn’t like the way Sally Bowles was portrayed. Isherwood’s model for the character had been a 19-year-old British girl named Jane Ross, who, he said, had been only a mediocre entertainer – yet here she was being portrayed by Liza Minnelli at the height of her powers. (I had a similar problem with the 1957 film Pal Joey, in which the male lead, Joey, was supposed to be a mediocre entertainer, but he was played by Frank Sinatra at the height of his powers.) Ironically, the basic story had been filmed before in 1955 as a non-musical called I Am a Camera, which my late home-care client and roommate John Primavera and I watched together on TV one night in the 1980’s for the first time. He’d been barred from seeing it on its initial release because he was still a boy and it had been restricted to adults only, and he’d been looking forward to it. Alas, both he and I found it terrible, especially since Sally Bowles was played by Julie Harris – who, like the late Heath Ledger, was only good at playing tortured introverts (as in Member of the Wedding, East of Eden and her one-woman show as Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst); she was as totally wrong for Sally Bowles as Liza Minnelli was triumphantly right!