Cabaret

CABARET (15)

D: Bob Fosse

ABC/Allied Artists (Cy Feuer)

USA 🇺🇸 1972

123 mins

Musical/War

W: Jay Presson Allen [based on the novel 'Goodbye To Berlin' by Christopher Isherwood]

DP: Geoffrey Unsworth

Ed: David Bretherton

Mus: Ralph Burns; John Kander & Fred Ebb

PD: Rolf Zehetbauer

Cos: Charlotte Flemming

Liza Minnelli (Sally Bowles), Michael York (Brian Roberts), Helmut Griem (Maximilian Von Heune), Joel Grey (Master of Ceremonies), Fritz Wapper (Fritz Wendel), Marisa Berenson (Natalia Landauer), Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel (Fräulein Schneider), Sigrid Von Richthofen (Fräulein Maur), Helen Vita (Fräulein Kost), Gerd Vespermann (Bobby)

Ensemble piece musical set in pre-WWII Berlin, a hot bed of anti-semitism and tension.

Sally Bowles is a singer and dancer at the Kit Kat Klub where she puts on a nightly revue to entertain the German hierarchy.

She shared her lover (York) with a German baron and her Jewish best friend (Berenson) also has a world of troubles.

Cabaret is the last truly great old-fashioned musical before the genre became practically obsolete. Liza Minnelli is excellent in the lead performance and Joel Grey is also incredibly memorable as the cuttingly incisive MC at the Kit Kat Klub.

Brilliantly directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, it remains his all-time best work.

The film won 8 Academy Awards, but did not win Best Picture. The figure remains a record haul for a film not named the best picture of the year (The Godfather won).

8/10