Cabaret Blu-ray Review
The UN-Musical
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, January 25, 2013
It's awe-inspiring to look back to the awards season of forty years past and see two cinematic
achievements of the caliber of
Cabaret and
The Godfather vying for top honors.
The Godfather
may have taken home best picture, but its total haul was three Oscars to
Cabaret's eight,
including the best director statue for Bob Fosse, which was sweet vindication after Fosse's
disastrous first outing as a filmmaker,
Sweet Charity.
Cabaret remains just as visceral and lively
a piece of dramatic craftsmanship as it was when it first hit movie screens in 1972. It might be
better known if there had been a decent video version available. Thankfully, one has finally
arrived, courtesy of Warner Home Video and MPI, Warner's on-site post house that
coincidentally also performed the digital resurrection of
The Godfather.
That
Cabaret is based on a successful Broadway musical is almost incidental. Large stretches of
the film play without song. Indeed, Fosse, his screenwriter, Jay Presson Allen, and various other
collaborators, including songwriters Kander & Ebb (
Chicago), so drastically reconceived the
material for the screen that many fans of the stage show (and I'm one of them) never get further
than complaining about the changes. But theater is one art form, and cinema is another. Fosse,
who had worked in both, understood the differences in intimate detail, and he was determined to
create a
movie. He succeeded so brilliantly that, as one participant in the new documentary on the
Blu-ray points out,
Cabaret is the only movie musical that people who hate musicals usually like.
No one in
Cabaret bursts into song to express themselves. The five songs from the stage show
that served such a function (the so-called "book" songs) were dropped. With one exception, the
only songs that were retained were those sung by performers from the stage of the Kit Kat Klub,
the seedy Berlin dive where one of the main characters, Sally Bowles, earned her meager living.
Kander & Ebb wrote two additional songs suitable for the Kit Kat's stage and added a third from
their existing repertoire. Allen's script was carefully structured so that the songs would comment,
often ironically, on actions occurring outside the club. The effect was enhanced in the editing
room, as Fosse and his editor, David Bretherton (another of the film's Oscar winners), used
abrupt transitions, unexpected rhythms and jarring, rapid-fire cuts to keep the audience off
balance.
At every level,
Cabaret is a technical marvel, but Fosse's perfectionism wasn't a matter of
craftsmanship for its own sake. At the end of
Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart's Rick famously
tells Ilse that their problems don't amount to "a hill of beans" in light of the Nazi threat.
Cabaret's characters can't see (or don't want to) beyond their hill of beans, even as that very
threat masses ominously around them. Fosse draws you deeply into the world of those characters,
but then he keeps breaking away to remind you of what they're ignoring. Ultimately,
Cabaret's
aim is to give the viewer an experience that answers the question that still puzzles so many: How
could an entire nation have remained complacent while such dangerous people took over?
Three main threads wind through
Cabaret, criss-crossing and looping over each other. The first
is the friendship, and then love affair, between Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), the would-be
actress with the oversize personality that disguises a perpetually broken heart, and Brian Roberts
(Michael York), the repressed Englishman who arrives in 1931 Berlin to continue his studies and
support himself by teaching English to Germans. Inquiring about a vacancy in the boarding house
where Sally lives, Brian is greeted by Sally at the door and is instantly swept into her world of
"divine decadence", as she beckons him inside with her brightly metallic green fingernails. Their
relationship is by turns comical, touching and tragic, because the more they get to know each
other, the more obvious it becomes that they are impossible as a couple.
The second thread is Germany's descent into fascism.
Cabaret is set just two years before the
Nazis gained control of the German government, and their presence is inescapable throughout the
film. Near the beginning, a Nazi supporter comes into the Kit Kat Klub, where Sally works, to
solicit donations and is immediately ushered out by the manager. (Shortly after, we see the
manager being beaten in an alley by Nazi sympathizers.) By the end of the film, the club's
audience is filled with patrons wearing swastika armbands. In between, numerous scenes (and
parts of scenes) attest to the gathering storm, even as Brian and Sally remain absorbed in their
day-to-day lives.
An especially chilling example occurs when Brian returns to the boarding house one day to find
his sweet, friendly neighbors sitting together in the front room trading stories from the official
Nazi press about the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and communists. Later, one of
Brian's pupils, Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), is subjected to a vicious attack, because she
is a member of a wealthy Jewish family. A subplot involving Natalia and a fortune hunter named
Fritz (Fritz Wepper), who woos her for her money, then discovers to his amazement that he's
fallen in love with his "mark", takes a dark turn, as Natalia's race becomes a matter of
controversy. Among people with money and influence, nonchalance rules the day. We will take
care of the Nazis, says Maximilian (Helmut Griem), the dissolute baron who briefly
"adopts" Brian and Sally as his playmates, but first let them take care of the communists for us.
(We all know how well
that worked out.)
The third and final thread is the Kit Kat Klub itself, the "cabaret" of the title, where Sally works
while she deludes herself that she has a future as an actress. A surreal and seedy locale, the club
is presided over by a mysterious figure known only as the Master of Ceremonies, or M.C. (Joel
Grey), who welcomes us to the film with his famous greeting ("Willkommen, bienvenue,
welcome!") and bids us farewell at the end. Over the years, people have speculated about the
identity of the M.C., whose presence bears more than a small touch of the demonic, especially
when director Fosse cuts to his grinning face at odd and unexpected moments. We never see the
M.C. away from the club or fully out of makeup, and Joel Grey has steadfastly refused to
comment on who he might be. One thing is for certain: When the M.C. is on screen, you cannot
take your eyes off him.
"Leave your troubles outside!" says the M.C. "In here, life is beautiful!" At one level, the M.C.
represents the wilful narcosis that blinded so many of the people of Germany (and the world) to
the Nazi threat. But at the same time, he presides over musical numbers that literally fling the
problem in the audience's face, while he grins over their complacency (the most obvious
example being "If You Could See Her"). Even when the club numbers seem to be commenting
primarily on Brian and Sally (as in "Money" or "Two Ladies"), the M.C.'s sardonic delivery
always hints at some larger game being played. Joel Grey won the Oscar for best supporting actor
in competition against Al Pacino and Robert Duvall in
The Godfather. Watch him weave his
spell around the Kit Kat Klub stage if you want to understand why.
Christopher Isherwood, on whose stories
Cabaret was based, complained that Liza Minnelli was
too talented to play Sally Bowles, who, in Isherwood's original conception, was supposed to be a
third-rate performer with hopeless aspirations. Isherwood had a point, but Fosse understood how
to use Minnelli's talent as a musical performer to create a different version of Sally Bowles, one
who
only exists as a creation on a stage and, once the lights go down, lapses back into an
emotionally wounded creature so desperate that she lives her life as if playing a part. Between
drinking, serial affairs and the endless lies Sally tells herself, there's barely anyone there, which is what
dooms her relationship with Brian. Minnelli finds layer after layer of humor and pathos in this
impossible creature and even makes her strangely appealing as she dances on the edge of a
volcano that is gathering itself for an imminent eruption. The famous title song of
Cabaret is
often treated as an anthem to living for the moment and enjoying what's in front of you, and
Minnelli, as Sally, gives it her all. Watch it in context, and pay attention to how Fosse follows it
up, and you'll never be able to listen to it the same way again.
Cabaret Blu-ray, Video Quality
Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray presentation of Geoffrey Unsworth's Oscar-winning
cinematography for
Cabaret is already drawing criticism for being "soft" and lacking in detail.
At the risk of offending some posters, I'm simply going to declare at the outset that these
criticisms are just wrong. This is a detailed image, as becomes immediately evident when one
examines such well-lit scenes as the language lessons that Brian conducts in Sally's room, or
Natalia Landauer's living room when Sally visits her, or the bedroom in Maximilian's castle
where he tells Brian that blue is "his" color.
Now, of course, when the environment is darker and the light is diffused by smoke, as is usually
the case in the Kit Kat Klub, there is less detail on display and deliberately so. The principal
artistic effect in such scenes is determined by strong contrasting colors, which the Blu-ray
reproduces admirably, as well as by appropriately delineated shades of black, which the Blu-ray
also reproduces accurately, showing figures in the dimly lit recesses of the club with just enough
detail to create the desired effect. Perhaps the most painterly of Unsworth's compositions can be
seen in the extended sequence at Maximilian's castle, where he, Sally and Brian drunkenly dance
through the night, in a huge hall marked by pools of light and shadow. Here again, the issue is
not whether one sees every hair follicle or furniture edge; it's whether one senses the
unfamiliarity of the shadowy territory into which Sally and Brian have entered, now that they're
in Maximilian's realm.
The Blu-ray of
Cabaret has a natural but unobtrusive grain structure and is free from obvious
artifacts of any kind, whether through grain reduction, high frequency filtering, artificial
sharpening or other manipulation. (Compression artifacts are also not an issue.) This ranks with
the very best of the film-like transfers I have seen. That it should be criticized for "softness" is
yet one more indication that Blu-ray viewers are beginning to lose any sense for the look of film
in an era when digital acquisition and projection have changed the way cinema is perceived.
Today, even those projects originally shot on film are immediately scanned, processed on digital
intermediates (so that, in most cases, all trace of their celluloid origin is removed) and output to
DCP ("digital cinema package") for theatrical distribution.
Cabaret comes from an era when
everything was analog, including shooting, editing, color timing and projection. That's how the
Blu-ray presents it, and that's how it should look. I have scored the video accordingly.
