Cabaret

Rating:
Summary: Oh, wie wunderbar...
Review: Unlike 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' and 'Tommy', Fosse's 1970's homage to everything 1930's is that rare thing - a celebrated cult (and mainstream) musical that even now, almost 30 years after its initial release, still hasn't lost its sparkle.

'Cabaret' deals with the story of a penniless writer (Michael York), who, upon arriving in pre-Hitler Berlin, meets and falls in love with a lounge singer named Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli). His life is turned upside-down by social and sexual revolution, played out against the backdrop of a city broken by depression and crying out for change.

It's the depth of emotion in this movie that gives it the edge over its contemporaries. The Jewish Vs. Christian love story provides a metaphor for the pre-Nazi turmoil experienced by 1930's Berliners, and Marisa Berenson gives one of her best performances as the Landauer heiress plagued by uncomfortable emotion and anti-semitic feeling. Similarly, Helmut Greim's performance as the wealthy, if somewhat sleazy, playboy Maximillian von Heune, provides us with an insight into cloak-and-dagger attitudes toward wealth and sexuality, prevalant at the time.

York's performance as the hapless Brian Roberts is very good indeed, but York has almost always played this sort of character - weedy Englishman with hidden depths. He does it well, however, and we truly believe that he is enthralled by the exotic Sally. But it's all Minnelli's show anyway, and her once-in-a-lifetime performance as Sally is the true heart of this picture. She is reckless yet innocent, another metaphor for pre-Nazi Germany. Crying out for love, yet deliberately eschewing it when it does eventually come her way, we too are sucked into her web of wide-eyed innocence and ultra-feminine sexuality.

Fosse's stark direction and sleazy, obvious choreography of the Kit-Kat Club, coupled with his detached, almost-bored perspectives on a depression-era city provide a grim and realistic backdrop for these stories. His complete lack of Hollywood-style glamour stands the test of time - why should a sleazy burlesque house in an impoverished city look like a Busby Berkley staircase, anyway? It's in this gritty portrayal of realistic poverty and living on the edge that Cabaret shines, with ugly, overweight dancing girls and a malevolent, amoral Emcee (the excellent Joel Gray) fuelling the fire of a doomed train on a one-way track.

The DVD extras are also rather good, interviews abound and there's some interesting comments to be had from the production team.

All in all, 'Cabaret' still shines as a cinematic masterpiece; a cautionary tale of love and infatuation. It's not a feel-good musical, but then again, very few of those are as worthwhile as this. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: It was a fine affair but now it's over...
Review: I saw Cabaret after seeing the recent film version of Chicago, and though I expected another lavish Fosse fantasy, what I saw was a very different film altogether. Chicago is a glamorous, glorified portrait of decadence without consequence, but Cabaret reveals the garish, disappointing underside of it all. The girls, the costumes, even the orchestra is not exactly beautiful. But they are honest. This divine decadence is literally all smoke and mirrors, it is all gaudy makeup over a dirty and desperate Germany in 1931.

While I'm not a huge fan of Liza Minnelli, she is perfect as wild child Sally Bowles. Michael York is equally wonderful as the innocent and effeminate Brian Roberts. I kind of wished that the film explored the ambiguous sexuality of the characters more than it did, but given the time the film was released, it is remarkable that the film has the frankness that it does. On that note, however, Cabaret could not have been released at a better time than in 1972. The idealistic hedonism of the sixties was drawing to a close, reality was about to set in, and like Sally, America was about to see the harsh effects of its divine decadence.

Rating:
Summary: poor image quality
Review: Cabaret is a great musical with a very serious underlying commentary on the rise of the Nazi power. This is a film to have in your own library and it is disappointing that the transfer to DVD has been so incompetently done. The level of visual noise puts a constant crawling "haze" over the images, which is most noticeable over flesh tones. If image quality is important to you, then this production will be disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: When I first saw this musical in my 10th grade english class as part of our american film unit, I was somewhat reluctant towards liking this movie. We ended up watching it again and evaluating it closer in order to really hit on the topics in the movie. After seeing it for the second time the movie started to stick with me. The continuous replay of the movie in my mind forced me to buy the DVD. While I watched it again I realized what a great piece of art this is. The movie shows one of the most troubled times in the world, and teaches us how to better ourselves from such a tradjedy. Each musical number is perfectly placed in order to build character developement and move the plot along. There are so many non-narritive elements in the movie that create a clear viewing of the true characters. This is truly a great american classic. You gain so much more out of watching this video than just a 2 hour enjoyment spree. Every part of the movie is perfectly crafted in order to develope the stories morals. I cannot speak enough about this movie. I believe everyone should see this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Life NOT such a Cabaret
Review: I too had great expectation of this reissue and the main reason I purchased it was for the stated anamorphic enhancement which it definitely is not. With all the interest in Kander & Ebb at the moment, this was a perfect opportunity to revamp a truely classic movie and address the poor transfer of the original issue. Warner are clearly just jumping on the promotional bandwagon with little concern for the value of the movie itself. This is Liza's finest moment and a critic's dream of cinematic metaphor and construction- it deserves better than this. It saddens me to think that it is unlikely to be issued again- the best Warner can do is recall this rerelease and do the job properly. I now own three versions on DVD- the region 2 uk release is even more washed out than the USA issue!

Rating:
Summary: 5-star movie, 0-star DVD transfer
Review: What a huge disappointment this 2003 DVD reissue is. It's in non-anamorphic widescreen, which basically means that the letterbox bars are part of the image signal. HDTV owners with 16:9 sets will be most affected, but anyone who plan on upgrading to HDTV anytime in the future should avoid making this DVD a part of their permanent library. People with newer-model, higher-end standard definition TV's will also be negatively impacted. Why did Warners go to all the trouble of reissuing this classic without doing a better job?

The film itself is one of the finest musicals ever made. If you're a fan, consider renting to get your Cabaret fix. If you feel you must buy it, plan on selling this edition at a future garage sale when the next reissue comes out.

Rating:
Summary: Cabaret
Review: The 2003 DVD re-release of Cabaret is just a re-packaging of the original DVD. Though the new package details state that it is "enhanced for 16 x 9," this DVD is a non-anamorphic, matted widescreen presentation. So if you were thinking of trading up to this new edition of Cabaret for your new widescreen TV, hold on to your money. I was not so fortunate. I now have two copies of Cabaret with lousy transfers. Whats up with Warner? They screwed up the release of Giant also. This film is a classic and deserves better treatment.

Rating:
Summary: Dark wild nights in the late Weimar period
Review: This is a very good movie, although deeply disturbing. Set in the great city of Berlin in 1931, a time of economic depression and political crisis, this movie constructs an image of the decadence and delusion of the late Weimar period as German society is plunging through a kind of moral and social decay into the nightmare of Nazism.

The film is based on "The Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood (written between 1935 and 1939), who lived in the city in the early 1930s. He had seen both the decadence and the dangerous hunger for a kind of national "purification" among many "respectable" and "moral" middle class Germans, who already had been traumatized by military defeat, hyperinflation, and mass unemployment. The film, following Isherwood, weaves together the stories of the marginal characters who live in this troubled city at the very edge of the great moral catastrophe of the 20th century.

Liza Minnelli is brilliant as "Sally Bowles", an Americanized version of the British Sally who appears in Isherwood's book, and her energy (and visible angst)drive the film as other characters wander aimlessly through a narrative heading all the time towards disaster. Michael York is effective as "Brian", the fictional stand-in for Isherwood himself, and the other characters present believable and even moving representations of people wandering through the impending nightmare as through a fog.

The nightmare itself is suggested by the increasing visibility of the Brownshirts and the sinister swastika, the authentic posters and grafitti from the period, and the passing visual allusion to the street fights and storm troopers. These allusions effectively evoke the sense of uneasiness and danger in the air, an effect reinforced by Sally's deep desire to scream her heart out. The smug and complacent self-assurance of the conservative aristocrat Maximilien, played by Helmut Griem, provides a clue to the almost wilfull blindness of even (perhaps especially) educated Germans to the moral danger posed by the Nazi movement. The anti-Semitism of the movement is also effectively displayed from several angles, most movingly through the love story between Fritz and Natalia.

But the strangest character is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub, played brilliantly by Joel Grey. His character has a sinister ambiguity; is he mocking the Nazis by his farcical musical satires, or rather is he reinforcing the anti-Semitic prejudices of his audience through such pieces as, "If you could see her as I do . . ."? Is his decadence ignoring the danger and plunging his head like an ostrich into the sand, or is it a critical commentary on the pseudo-morality that worries about cabarets while ignoring Nazis? By the way, the entertainment at the movie Kit Kat Klub is first-rate (far, far better than the actual entertainment at the real Kit Kat cabaret, according to the later testimony of Isherwood, commenting on Liza Minnelli's performance). But this Bob Fosse-choreographed spectacle underlines both the brilliance and the moral danger of the cabaret.

In historical fact, most Berliners were not Nazis; it was a largely working class town with strong Socialist and even Communist neighborhoods and a powerful left-wing tradition (which is why Hitler hated Berlin). But it was not immune to the Nazis. The Nazis themselves liked to contrast the supposed "healthy" vitality of a romanticized rural and small-town Germany against the decadence of urban Berlin, a point that is made in the film when young Nazi youth leaders at a beer garden lead an increasingly Nazified crowd to join in song celebrating nature and the volk. The film effectively plays out the irony of this contrast between a "moral" rural Germany increasingly drawn to the appeal of a profoundly immoral and murderous movement, and the "immoral" decadence of urban Berlin, many of whose cabaret performers would probably wind up in concentration camps within a few years. Hitler, after all, was big on public "morality." It's just that this kind of "morality" didn't stop him from screaming hatred, fanning murderous resentments, murdering millions of Jews, and plunging Europe into the most catastrophic war in history. Cabaret performers, however otherwise decadent, could not be blamed for that. And decadent Brian even manages to get into a fist fight with some Nazi Brownshirts.

This is a great film. It doesn't tell you what to think about the Emcee, or poor yearning but lively Sally, or even Brian himself. But whatever their tales, we know where the story is going. We know what those brownshirts and swastikas mean when we see them reflected in the glass at the end of the film. "Life is a Cabaret," as Sally tells us in her climactic song, but even the best shows sometimes have the darkest endings.

Rating:
Summary: The most amazing musical ever made.
Review: This is the best movie musical ever made in my opinion , Bob Fosse is a true legend , the sheer life of the story and the performances all add up to an amazing movie.

Rating:
Summary: LIKE GABLE'S RHETT, LIZA'S SALLY WILL LIVE FOREVER!
Review: My feeble words can't equal the well deserved accoldes this picture has received from high places... If motion pictures are truly an art form, then this is about as good as it gets!... Cast, performances, story line, production values, and music are flawless... It was a matter of everything being at the right place at the right time... It's a history lesson, a love story, a black comedy, and a superb musical all rolled into one... Liza's multi-level characterization of the profane, talented, and worldly, yet child-like Sally Bowles is a classic that drives the rest of the story which centers on the gaudy decadent desperation of post WWI depression-riddled Berlin, played against the nightly goings on it a Cabaret... The Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) reflects the seething anger remaining from the war, and the insult that followed, as projected toward rising nationalism, and takeover by the Nazi party... The gathering clouds of what will come are all there to see... I loved this picture when it was first released, and have the VHS tape which I watched every few years, but until you have seen it on DVD with the digitally re-mastered picture and sound, which is nearly flawless, you really haven't seen it!... I am building a giant screen Video Projection System at the moment, and am looking foreward to seeing this larger-than-life... This is a MUST HAVE DVD for the true movie lover!