Bob Fosse’s film of the stage musical keeps the songs on a tiny club stage and lets Berlin turn brown outside the door. Minnelli and Grey are extraordinary; the scenes between the numbers are not, and we do not much mind.
Bob Fosse’s Cabaret takes the Broadway musical and does something the Hollywood musical had almost never done: nobody sings unless they are paid to. Every number but one is performed on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub, a Berlin dive in 1931, and the story of Sally Bowles and the Englishman down the hall is told in ordinary rooms without music. Fosse was a choreographer before he was a director, and he knows what a body on a stage means. It is the rare musical that gets darker each time we see it, and we recommend it with one reservation about what happens when the singing stops.
Joel Grey’s Master of Ceremonies opens the film in a warped mirror, white-faced and rouged, and welcomes us in three languages. Geoffrey Unsworth lights the club from the footlights up, so every face on stage has a shine of grease and shadows in the wrong places. Herbert Strabel’s set is small and mean: a low stage, tables close enough to touch the dancers. Fosse’s dancers work with knees turned in and fingers splayed, hats over one eye, and Grey conducts them like a man who finds everything funny and nothing surprising. His grin is the most frightening thing in the film and he barely raises his voice.
Liza Minnelli’s Sally does ‘Mein Herr’ in a bowler hat and black stockings on a bentwood chair, and Charlotte Flemming dresses her in the same few black things throughout, so that off stage in a shabby fur she still looks half in costume. Minnelli plays her as a woman who wants to be looked at so badly she has stopped seeing anything else: loud, pushy, a little exhausting, which is right. Then she sings ‘Maybe This Time’ under one light while David Bretherton cuts to her and Brian in the boarding house, and it moved us more than we expected. Her face at the end of the last note has given up before the applause starts.
The street arrives in pieces. Men in brown shirts collect money at the club door. Bretherton cuts a slap-dance routine against a beating in an alley, one blow on stage for each blow off it, and here we side with the film’s few detractors: the point lands on the first cut and the sequence keeps making it. The one song outside the club is another matter. Brian and his rich new friend Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) stop at a country beer garden, a blond boy stands and sings ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ in a clear tenor, and Unsworth’s camera moves down from his face and shows us what he is wearing. Then the garden gets to its feet, a table at a time. We were horrified, and what horrified us was that we had been enjoying the tune. Fosse does not cut to a clenched fist. One old man stays seated, and that is all.
The boarding house is where the film is weakest, and it is where most of the plot lives. Jay Presson Allen’s screenplay, taken from the stage show and from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, gives Brian little to want, and Michael York plays him at a slight remove, so that we sometimes wonder why he is there. Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper), a gigolo taking English lessons to improve his prospects, and Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), the heiress he sets his cap at, carry a subplot the film keeps forgetting and then remembering. Berenson has poise and one good scene of alarmed innocence, and not much else to play. Griem’s Maximilian arrives in a long car with a great deal of money, and the middle of the film follows him; we will leave it there.
The songs, by John Kander with Fred Ebb, are why the trick holds. They are good enough to enjoy as songs and nasty enough to enjoy with a bad conscience. ‘Money, Money’ is a music-hall turn about poverty performed for people about to lose everything, and the number in which the Master of Ceremonies dances with a gorilla in a frock has a last line we will not quote. A studio musical of the period would have taken Sally into the street and made the traffic dance. Fosse keeps her on a stage the size of a kitchen table and shows us who is clapping.
At 124 minutes and with a 15 certificate, it is not for a family Sunday, whatever the tagline says about life. The Master of Ceremonies asks us to leave our troubles outside. For about twenty minutes we did.
