It's not that I dislike musicals. Maybe it's that I don't quite "get" this film. But Cabaret only very rarely worked for me. In a nutshell (I'll flesh all of this out more below), I'm not sure I got the point of setting the film in Berlin during the transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany. I didn't really like the music or the cabaret performances. Very little of the soap opera stuff had any impact on me. I strongly disliked Liza Minnelli and only occasionally liked Michael York. And the direction, cinematography, and most of the technical elements did very little for me. There were a couple things I did enjoy (one not so minor), but you'll have to read on to discover what they were (I need to create _some_ suspense here).
Cabaret is the story of Sally Bowles (Minnelli) and Brian Roberts (York). Bowles is living in Berlin in 1931, singing and dancing in a cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub. During the opening, we see Roberts just arriving in town. He ends up at the boarding house where Bowles is living, hoping to acquire a room. He's taking a working vacation from graduate school in England. He plans on earning his room and board by teaching English to Germans.
Roberts and Bowles' relationship evolves over the course of the film--that's the gist of the plot. Roberts also makes two friends among his students, Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) and the very rich Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), and Bowles meets the even richer Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) at the dry cleaners. All of this is interspersed with occasional cabaret performances (only very seldomly featuring Minnelli) and even less occasional references to the rise of the Nazi party. The bulk of the film is soap-operatic relationships among the characters.
Cabaret had a somewhat circuitous trip to the silver screen, starting with the semi-autobiographical fiction of Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Berlin between 1929 and 1933. After Isherwood, the material was transformed into a play and then a film both entitled I Am a Camera (1955). Finally, it became the Broadway show, and after that, this film version, for which director and famed choreographer Bob Fosse wanted to look back to Isherwood's writing. I haven't read Isherwood's work yet, but from what I understand, it has more of an essay-like tonality, and attempts to capture life in the relatively "decadent" Berlin of the 1930s in detail.
Unfortunately, the end result is that this film version of Cabaret plays like a directionless pastiche of mostly mundane events. The goal seems to be an in-depth portrait of a troubled woman in a troubled-environment, and conjointly maybe a commentary on contributing factors that led to the imbalanced state of both. But what Fosse achieved instead was a random-feeling, poorly acted hodgepodge of soap-operatic nonsense.
Minnelli's performance is so loaded with annoying affectations, and she so frequently overacts--not to mention that she's very disturbing to look at--that it kills what little dramatic impact the pithier developments should have. York vacillates between confusion, woodenness and overacting, occasionally finding a balanced middle ground that's enjoyable, but it's like waiting for a slow-moving pendulum to reach its nadir.
The Nazi material, including the two all-too-brief instances of society embracing some of the attitudes or ideas, could have been very strong and poignant--especially in contrast to the freewheeling life depicted elsewhere. But Fosse makes no kind of commitment to it, so it ends up feeling like it was added on as an afterthought, like scotch-taping a paper lapel to an otherwise complete cashmere coat.
Fritz and Natalia, the two characters that I did enjoy and who had a compelling story that was intimately bound up with rising Nazism, were largely ignored. Fosse spends maybe 10 minutes on them.
The music and choreography for the cabaret performances lies somewhere between banal and unpleasantly corny. It has a kind of vaudeville "shake your derriere to the cowbell" hamminess, while the choreography involves a lot of mugging--again those annoying affectations--that saps all of the potential effectiveness out of the art direction. Maybe that music was popular in these kinds of German clubs in the 1930s, but would some melodic, harmonic and rhythmic inventiveness--not to mention some finer artistry in the lyrics--have killed Fosse and his composers? It can't be that John Kander and Fred Ebb were unfamiliar with Kurt Weill, for instance.
Besides, for the other element I really liked--the art direction and production design--Fosse went out of his way to give us something intriguingly surreal. The look of the film, especially the cabaret scenes, including the garishly painted faces and bizarre costumes and overall appearance of the performers, is based on the visual art of George Grosz and Otto Dix--even going so far as recreating characters from Dix paintings down to small details. I'm a huge Dix fan, so I enjoyed this aspect of the film. But I wanted this aesthetic to be followed in other areas, too, rather than the very pedestrian and unsurprising route that was taken.
(By the way, I know that my score of 6 may seem high given my review, but remember that a 6 is equivalent to a "D" in my way of looking at ratings. There were at least two elements I liked--with the art direction/production design being very important to the film, and I rate on all artistic and technical elements. The film has passable cinematography, lighting, sound, etc., even if they weren't anything special to me.)
Cabaret is the story of Sally Bowles (Minnelli) and Brian Roberts (York). Bowles is living in Berlin in 1931, singing and dancing in a cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub. During the opening, we see Roberts just arriving in town. He ends up at the boarding house where Bowles is living, hoping to acquire a room. He's taking a working vacation from graduate school in England. He plans on earning his room and board by teaching English to Germans.
Roberts and Bowles' relationship evolves over the course of the film--that's the gist of the plot. Roberts also makes two friends among his students, Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) and the very rich Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), and Bowles meets the even richer Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) at the dry cleaners. All of this is interspersed with occasional cabaret performances (only very seldomly featuring Minnelli) and even less occasional references to the rise of the Nazi party. The bulk of the film is soap-operatic relationships among the characters.
Cabaret had a somewhat circuitous trip to the silver screen, starting with the semi-autobiographical fiction of Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Berlin between 1929 and 1933. After Isherwood, the material was transformed into a play and then a film both entitled I Am a Camera (1955). Finally, it became the Broadway show, and after that, this film version, for which director and famed choreographer Bob Fosse wanted to look back to Isherwood's writing. I haven't read Isherwood's work yet, but from what I understand, it has more of an essay-like tonality, and attempts to capture life in the relatively "decadent" Berlin of the 1930s in detail.
Unfortunately, the end result is that this film version of Cabaret plays like a directionless pastiche of mostly mundane events. The goal seems to be an in-depth portrait of a troubled woman in a troubled-environment, and conjointly maybe a commentary on contributing factors that led to the imbalanced state of both. But what Fosse achieved instead was a random-feeling, poorly acted hodgepodge of soap-operatic nonsense.
Minnelli's performance is so loaded with annoying affectations, and she so frequently overacts--not to mention that she's very disturbing to look at--that it kills what little dramatic impact the pithier developments should have. York vacillates between confusion, woodenness and overacting, occasionally finding a balanced middle ground that's enjoyable, but it's like waiting for a slow-moving pendulum to reach its nadir.
The Nazi material, including the two all-too-brief instances of society embracing some of the attitudes or ideas, could have been very strong and poignant--especially in contrast to the freewheeling life depicted elsewhere. But Fosse makes no kind of commitment to it, so it ends up feeling like it was added on as an afterthought, like scotch-taping a paper lapel to an otherwise complete cashmere coat.
Fritz and Natalia, the two characters that I did enjoy and who had a compelling story that was intimately bound up with rising Nazism, were largely ignored. Fosse spends maybe 10 minutes on them.
The music and choreography for the cabaret performances lies somewhere between banal and unpleasantly corny. It has a kind of vaudeville "shake your derriere to the cowbell" hamminess, while the choreography involves a lot of mugging--again those annoying affectations--that saps all of the potential effectiveness out of the art direction. Maybe that music was popular in these kinds of German clubs in the 1930s, but would some melodic, harmonic and rhythmic inventiveness--not to mention some finer artistry in the lyrics--have killed Fosse and his composers? It can't be that John Kander and Fred Ebb were unfamiliar with Kurt Weill, for instance.
Besides, for the other element I really liked--the art direction and production design--Fosse went out of his way to give us something intriguingly surreal. The look of the film, especially the cabaret scenes, including the garishly painted faces and bizarre costumes and overall appearance of the performers, is based on the visual art of George Grosz and Otto Dix--even going so far as recreating characters from Dix paintings down to small details. I'm a huge Dix fan, so I enjoyed this aspect of the film. But I wanted this aesthetic to be followed in other areas, too, rather than the very pedestrian and unsurprising route that was taken.
(By the way, I know that my score of 6 may seem high given my review, but remember that a 6 is equivalent to a "D" in my way of looking at ratings. There were at least two elements I liked--with the art direction/production design being very important to the film, and I rate on all artistic and technical elements. The film has passable cinematography, lighting, sound, etc., even if they weren't anything special to me.)