As singing star Sally Bowles takes the stage among the heavily choreographed dollfaced dancers we also see young Brian Roberts slight from the train and breeze through the streets in search of cheap accommodation so he can take his Cambridge studies further still. These two meet at her rooming house when they stumble through some misdirected niceties and he learns the drill of the house and goes on a tour. His room is poky and grey but it's across the hall from hers and her sparkling life force. He takes it.
She shows him how Berlin works in the streets and at the club and we get a lot of wicked wit from the stage in the form of expert moves, arch lyrics and acts that tell the times with the distilled accuracy of burlesque. Brian takes on students who bring their own subplot and both he and Sally are swept up by omni-hungry aristocrat Maximillian whose house and estate in the country is only outsized by his appetites. He's fun, they're fun, and everything empties like a bottle of Heinkel Trocken. Their last encounter reminds us that Maximillian has figured that once the increasingly visible Nazis on the streets will erase the communists only to be erased by the remaining decent folk like him. They stop at a country pub where a Hitler Youth boy sings the only song in the musical that takes place away from the Kit Kat Club. Tomorrow Belongs to Me starts out all nature and Julie Andrews until its symbols of ancient rights and reclaiming history stir up the crowd as they join in. It's the polar opposite of the Marsellaise scene in Casablanca. Young women, middle aged men, children, all take voice to a deafening chorus of impassioned shared hatred. If you aren't freezing in your seat you need help. The scene holds extraordinary power and it's strengthened by the returning shot of the ancient man who keeps his seat beside his beer who can only gaze into the light before him with a weariness that outweighs him.
From there it's a downhill roll as Sally and Brian declare a doomed marriage plan, English language students Fritz and Natalia commit to a union immeasurably more doomed, and the next version of the opening pan over the reflection in the metal, following the defiant last gasp of the title song, and we see that every other audience member's arm is ringed with a swastika armband. The exhilaration of the message of life as a cabaret is roughly contradicted by a symbol that tells us that it won't be sassy or funny or even much resembling humanity for many, many years.
I saw this as a late night movie on a commercial channel on the black and white tv of my student house in 1980 in Brisbane. Queensland was a corrupted state at the time and anyone who didn't buy into the monoculture was an easy (often visibly so) target for the attention of the worst of the populace and its politicised police force. This film's theme of snarky fun going on at the expense of the regime and how the stronger force from the top was not going to give in or forget opposition without drastic action, hit right home. In more ways than one Brisbane substituted for Berlin with very little effort. Tomorrow Belongs to Me was a kind of joke state anthem among opponents, a sour joke but sometimes that's all you can get. Seeing it again brought those years back for me and I was again struck by the tightness of the narrative and central concept of stage/offstage life and how the Nazi anthem breaks that scheme the way the Nazis themselves did for real.
The pallet has the rich tones of the cinema of the day and feels more European than American and will, almost by itself, remind the adventurous viewer of the look and feel of other continental callbacks to the past that was starting to free itself from grief and anger to be examined at the cinema. The Damned, Salon Kitty and so on live in the same colour realm.
Broadway maestro Bob Fosse's choreography is machine prefect but warmly sassy and perfected through cinematic angle choices and tight editing. He's a little less even when it comes to performances but then he doesn't always have the material. Marissa Berenson's third act confessional dialogue with Fritz Wepper feel stagey despite, in one case, taking place on the running board of a moving car. Berenson, a career model, was cast for her beauty and if her Cherman accent is more comedy sketch Sveeedish than Wepper's real one it is surrounded by such commitment to be politely overlooked.
Michael York was also being cast for looks first as at this point in his career he struggles to emote. In his case, though, this does come in handy as he is meant to be tight laced, mumblingly coy about his sexuality and barely capable of handling the slightest deviation from his expectations of normality. When Sally challenges him to a cathartic scream under the train tracks his attempt falls kilometres short of her larynx-tearing explosion. Is it a poor performance if most of it probably comes from the actor's own guardedness? Is that any less of a thing than overstated method acting? York ends up being one of the features of the film and a welcome presence for us as we'd rather have him than us deal with Sally.
Sally is a handful from the word go and if you were iffy about Liza Minelli's four on the floor assault of it then this is not the movie for you. Springing from the legacy of a famous and infamous mother into her own showbiz persona, Liza Minelli took every role up to this and beyond to slam a flag on every project. But she's not just playing big. Between her and Fosse she knows to ride the hyperbolic actory onslaught so that while it can be irritating that feels intentional and it is never quite pushed to fulsome. York's self conscious Englishness comes in handy here but Minelli is clearly working nuance. When Sally is discovered in dark disappointment after her father stood her up on a dinner reunion we understand the pain that the high flamboyance masks and when that returns on high with Maximillian in the picture we know that it will have to be called on at the end of the thrill. This is Minelli's film to lose and she never lets go of the lead.
Deserving of his own paragraph is Joel Grey who took his celebrated and award winning role as MC to the screen and immortalised himself by his turn. Entirely caked in greasepaint and highlighter, having no dialogue beyond his hectoring addresses to the audience, he speaks in song and dance and is bawdy, charming, conspiratorial, pathetic, and sometimes even frightening, and always magnetic. His presence survives one of the film's triumphs in the number If You Could See Her Through My Eyes. He sings as a dancer in a gorilla costume lopes in his arms. At first it's an ugly girl joke aimed straight into the audience's imagined bigotry but it pushes it right to the ends with the final line whose chill is delivered without accompaniment: "If you could see her through my eyes she wouldn't look Jewish at all." If there had been ambiguity about the club's attitude to the steadily infiltrating Fascism it is abandoned here. The performance goes from an uncomfortable joke to a slap in the face and it is Joel Grey's expert delivery that carries us through it. It might be Liza's show but it would collapse without him.
Cabaret continues to delight. Made with warmth that doesn't neglect precision and a world building that makes us want to walk its streets and get a table at that club, every night of the year. And that despite what we know (more than the characters) about what the loony right wingers in their boy scout uniforms were going to do to the world. So, do we still need reminding that the Nazis were bad guys? Look around.
PS - I am aware that the source material for the play and this film was a number of short stories written by Christopher Isherwood based on his own experiences but my concern was the film itself rather than the development of its text.
Viewing notes: I watched this on Warner Brothers stellar Blu-Ray with deep colour and an immersive 5.1 audio track. I would advise you to do the same if you can't find an anniversary cinema screening.
