Loosely adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret asks what individuals can do in a world gone wrong. A young British academic named Brian Roberts (Michael York) comes to Berlin in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. While there, he meets Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli), a singer at a local cabaret. The two young people pursue an aimless existence. Brian teaches and Sally sings. Together, they attempt to seduce a wealthy German. Meanwhile, in the background, the Nazis grow in power. The denizens of the cabaret escape the world around them by plunging into hedonism and denial; meanwhile, many of their fellow citizens are facing increasing violence at the hands of the Nazis. And yet, the movie has also come to be embraced for the way it shows people like Sally Bowles living their lives—not fearlessly, but courageously—in the face of a society that wishes to destroy them.
This mixture of impulses makes Cabaret a complicated film to watch. The viewer must always hold two conflicting viewpoints: an understanding that, ultimately, Sally’s insistence that “life is a cabaret” is a flight from reality; those faces watching her in the crowd are the faces of Nazis. Neither she nor any of the people around her can escape what is coming. Indeed, as the song “If You Could See Her” shows with its antisemitic stinger (“If you could just see her through my eyes / She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”), this very place of escape has been infected by the evil around it. And yet, viewers must also understand that carnival and parody are sometimes the only recourse of the afflicted. When the powerful want you dead, the most courageous act is to live. Far from an exercise in trite moralism, Cabaret is a work that is seriously engaged in a fundamental human—we might say, a spiritually significant—question: what is the responsibility of an individual in the face of overpowering evil? The movie, as befits a serious work, does not offer any easy answers. Instead, it leaves viewers with a provocation. We must make a decision for ourselves.
— Nathanael T. Booth (2022)
Directed by: Bob Fosse
Produced by: Martin Baum; Cy Feuer; Harold Nebenzal
Written by: Joe Masteroff; John Van Druten; Christopher Isherwood; Jay Allen
Music by: Ralph Burns; John Kander
Cinematography by: Geoffrey Unsworth
Editing by: Bretherton
Release Date: 1972
Running Time: 124 min.
Language: English and German
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