Bob Fosse (1972)

To begin at the beginning …

For me, there’s never been another film like Bob Fosse’s Cabaret.  It’s safe to say – as it approaches its half-century, now that I’m long past mine – there never will be again.  It’s the only film that has put me in the curious company of fans of a movie who keep watching it in a devotional spirit.  I long ago lost count of my Cabaret viewings total but it must be well into the thirties.  (I doubt I’ve seen any other film as many as ten times.)  Nearly all these viewings took place during the 1970s, when I was in my late teens and early twenties.  The first was at the York Odeon in August 1972 (I think the very week this became a three-screen cinema – a big deal at the time).  When the film made a seven-day return visit to York a few years later, I went every night.  I know I saw it in Sheffield, I think I saw it in Leeds but expeditions to Yorkshire backwaters I’d never (as far as I remember) been to before and where I’ve not returned since – Tadcaster, Driffield – are a better illustration of the obsession.  For several years, this film was the benchmark for everything else I saw on the screen.  By the end of the seventies, I recognised and cherished it as a fundamental inspiration of my love of cinema.  The addiction to Cabaret – the need to keep seeing it repeatedly – had gone by then.  Gratitude to the people who made it has always remained.

I won’t get into the factors that drew me to the film – I’m still not sure what they were – but one of the main effects of engaging so strongly was an irrational sense of responsibility for, and sensitivity to, adverse criticism of it.  Until recently, I’d kept notes, copious but largely incoherent, that I wrote about Cabaret in the 1970s.  Their main interest now is that they’re also predominantly defensive.  This note too will include a bit of that defensiveness, with reference to some British reviews around the time of the film’s release from which I transcribed extracts.  More important, though, how is Cabaret in 2018?  (This month’s viewing must have been my first in at least a decade – I’ve seen it perhaps three or four times during the past thirty years.)  The print used by BFI wasn’t great:  there were a few jumps and the look of some sequences inside Fräulein Schneider’s boarding house went beyond the aptly dingy – the images were muddy in a way I’m sure they weren’t in the original.   But this physical deterioration was the only falling off.   It was thrilling, as well as reassuring, to realise again this is an outstanding film.  It’s remarkable for a piece of cinema promoted forty-odd years ago as differently modern that Cabaret isn’t at all dated.

Fosse’s film was the latest version of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, first published in 1939.  John van Druten turned these into the play I Am a Camera, staged on Broadway in 1951; John Collier wrote the screenplay for Henry Cornelius’s 1955 film of the same name.  The musical Cabaret, produced by Hal Prince and with book, song lyrics and music by Joe Masteroff, Fred Ebb and John Kander respectively, was first staged on Broadway in 1966.  The film, shot in West Germany in 1971, was released in the US in February 1972 and in Britain in June that year.  Cabaret is set in Germany in the twilight of the Weimar Republic.  Unlike its stage antecedent, the screen adaptation is an almost exclusively backstage musical:  all but one of the numbers are performed in a sleazy Berlin cabaret, the Kit Kat Klub.  The songs introduce and, in effect, supply a satirical commentary on the story told in the intervals between them.

That story focuses on the relationships of five young people (the ages of the actors playing them ranged from mid-twenties to late thirties).  Brian Roberts (Michael York), the Isherwood alter ego, is a Cambridge graduate, in Berlin to complete work on his doctorate and giving English lessons to pay the rent.  Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) is a rich, sophisticated aristocrat (a baron) and Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) an impecunious opportunist.  Nathalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson) is the daughter of an industrialist:  her family, in the words of fortune-hunting Fritz, are ‘enormous rich Jews’.  The American Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) also claims eminent parentage – her father is ‘practically an ambassador’ – but she’s more conspicuously a good time girl, driven by the ambition of becoming ‘a great film star – that is, if booze and sex don’t get me first’.  Sally, who performs at the Kit Kat Klub as a singer and dancer, is the link between the onstage and offstage worlds of the film.

During the opening credits, the screen at first is dark.  An image starts to form against a gradually developing soundtrack – hum of conversation, clinking glasses, a band tuning up.  It takes a few moments to work out that the screen is showing distorted reflections of the audience from which some of those sounds are emanating.  We see a waiter pass among them but can’t make out faces until, immediately after a drum roll and the legend ‘Berlin 1931’, startling over-compensation arrives:  a face slides into close-up in the distorting mirror, from which it then turns to camera and to the Kit Kat Klub audience.  The face is instantly intimidating, first in its momentary unsmiling stare, then in the knowing conspiratorial grin that follows.  It’s initially hard to tell from the heavily made-up face and the slicked-back hair whether we’re looking at a man or a woman.  This is the face of the Kit Kat’s master of ceremonies (Joel Grey), who starts to sing ‘Willkommen’.  The melody and the metallic but insinuating quality of Joel Grey’s singing evoke the musical style of The Threepenny Opera.  The camera’s tour of the audience and the bar area reveals sights that recall the work of George Grosz.  Throughout this opening number, Bob Fosse also cuts between the club and the world outside it, as pleasant- and innocuous-looking Brian Roberts arrives by train in Berlin and makes his way to a boarding house in search of lodgings.

The Emcee advertises the escapist charms of the cabaret :

‘Leave your troubles outside
So life is disappointing, forget it!
In here life is beautiful
The girls are beautiful
Even the orchestra is beautiful …’

He introduces the Kit Kat personnel, among them:  the fleshy, all-women orchestra; the six girls in the chorus line (‘each and every one a virgin’ – cue sceptical on-screen audience laughter); Fräulein Elke (Ricky Renee), a drag act; a ventriloquist and his dummy; and Sally Bowles.  The Emcee may look extraordinary but he’s a recognisable cheap comic – nuzzling the cabaret dancers, looking down a band member’s top then staring back up at the audience open-mouthed.  In the climax to the number, as he reprises its opening lines (‘Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome/Fremde, étranger, stranger …’), he leans forward from the stage, grasps and vigorously shakes the hand of an audience member (‘Hello, stranger!’), and laughs ecstatically.  In the course of this prologue, the film’s director has achieved a comparable grip on his audience – a grip that Bob Fosse continues to exert each time he returns to the cabaret.  Joel Grey was the only member of the original Broadway cast of Cabaret to appear in the film yet his screen Emcee has the vibrancy of a fresh creation.  Both lewd and asexual, the master of ceremonies is the protean spirit of place, epitomising its tawdry dynamism and repulsive allure.  He controls proceedings but as if propelled by the larger cultural decadence of which he’s a showbiz expression.  He has the look of a painted puppet and there are moments in Grey’s brilliant performance – including the Emcee’s exit bow at the very end of the film – when he remarkably imitates the movements of a marionette.  At the end of ‘Willkommen’, the whole company takes a bow with the little Emcee hoisted on the shoulders of others.  He’s the king of the castle but the sequence’s last shot highlights, as well as him, the ventriloquist’s dummy.

The Emcee’s sexually ambiguous presence serves as an early foreshadowing of the uncertain, inconstant amours that develop between the main characters.  When the decidedly heterosexual Sally first makes a play for Brian, it gets no further than an admission from him that his few previous efforts to have straight sex were all abject failures.  To their shared surprise, Sally and Brian do achieve a physical relationship that seems mutually satisfying until Maximilian, a playboy bisexual (and married man), seduces them both – the ménage a trois previewed in the ‘Two Ladies’ number that the Emcee and two Kit Kat girls perform.  (The one-man-two-women ménage of the song, in reversing the gender balance of the Sally-Brian-Max set-up, only reinforces the atmosphere of sexual fluidity.)  Fritz’s pursuit of Nathalia leads to a change of motive rather than of sexual allegiance or orientation:  he starts out trying to make a lucrative marriage and ends up falling in love with the girl, rather than her fortune.

Fosse’s tone in describing these interactions isn’t disapproving – he views each of the five characters with a clear but sympathetic eye – yet the mix of pretences and desires at work and the powerful sense that the latter must be satisfied instantly captures what, with hindsight, we think of as a key characteristic of Weimar Germany.  Retrospection is essential to this film.  It comes through in the form of reminders of Cabaret‘s cultural heritage – the music of Kurt Weill, German expressionist paintings and drawings, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel.  It comes through too in the recognition that Weimar meant living in the present not just because people were heedless of the future but because – to borrow from the title of another of the film’s songs – tomorrow really would belong to the Nazis.  The romance between Fritz and Nathalia survives thanks to his owning up to not being a Gentile, something he’s pretended to be – as if his life depended on it.   The Nathalia-Fritz subplot culminates in a Jewish wedding service and the nobly melancholy voice of a cantor (Estrongo Nachama).  It makes tragic sense that, after this point in the film, the Jewish couple simply disappears.

 ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ is the one number performed outside the Kit Kat Klub.  The setting is the sunlit beer garden of a rural inn.  The singer is a blonde-haired teenager (Oliver Collignon, lip-synching to the voice of Mark Lambert), whose Nazi youth uniform is gradually revealed.  The song lyrics develop into the expression of a distinctly political vision.  The Aryan boy’s pastorale solo builds to shockingly enthusiastic community singing:  the only non-participant in the packed beer garden, apart from Brian and Maximilian, is a baffled, uneasy old man.  ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, although an outlier in performance terms, is one of the film’s several politically charged numbers.  The Emcee’s talents include knowing what his audience wants and giving it to them.  Jokes made at the expense of Hitler’s moustache and stormtrooper goose-stepping are adjusted to accommodate the increasing number of swastika armbands in the audience.   ‘If You Could See Her’, a romantic soft-shoe shuffle in which the Emcee’s partner wears a pink dress and a gorilla mask, is performed – and received by the cabaret audience – as a (bizarre) sentimental ballad until its punch line:  ‘If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all’.

Bob Fosse shows fine discrimination in the selection of production numbers from the original stage show.  This helps ensure not only that each of the film’s numbers is a highlight but also that the episodes between them have independent substance and aren’t remotely the filler they often are in musicals.  The result is a fluent balance and entirely effective juxtaposition of songs and story.  In the first Broadway Cabaret, ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ was sung twice – in the Kit Kat Klub (by a Nazi youth, the Emcee and a chorus of waiters), then by Fräulein Schneider’s tenants.  Relocating the song in the beer garden is Fosse’s most inspired change but he makes good use of other material from the stage song score.  ‘The Money Song’ has become an instrumental (named ‘Sitting Pretty’ on the film soundtrack) played on a gramophone – as does a small part of ‘Don’t Tell Mama’.  More significantly, ‘Heiraten’, voiced by the German cabaret singer Greta Keller, is heard repeatedly on gramophone and wireless.  This wistful tribute to matrimony becomes the virtual signature tune to Sally’s and Brian’s failure to get to the altar.  As well as creating new numbers for the film (‘Mein Herr’ in place of  ‘Don’t Tell Mama’, ‘Money, Money’ in place of ‘The Money Song’), Kander and Ebb also supplied ‘Maybe This Time’, a song they’d written several years before and which Liza Minnelli had recorded as a track on her debut album.  Fosse’s shrewd choices also mean that nothing performed in the Kit Kat Klub feels alien to its tacky showbiz character.  He intensifies our sense that the show over which the Emcee presides is a metaphor for a desperately self-indulgent, decaying culture.

It’s easy now to assume that Bob Fosse and Cabaret were made for each other.  With his personal experience of American burlesque shows in the late 1930s and an abiding talent for realising the dynamism and sensuality of theatrical glitz, Fosse was probably uniquely qualified for the job.  The Kit Kat Klub numbers – especially ‘Mein Herr’, with its chair-and-hat business, the angular movements of Liza Minnelli and the other girls – showcase his choreographic trademarks.  It’s easy too, though, to forget that Cabaret was only his second feature film; that the first, Sweet Charity (1969), had been an expensive box-office failure; that if Cabaret had followed suit it would surely have ended his career in cinema.  Trying to force this square peg into the round hole of ‘wholesome’ screen musical would obviously have killed the film:  Fosse nevertheless deserves huge credit for holding his nerve and refusing to compromise.   So does the producer Cy Feuer for, in the event, letting him do so – even if, according to Fosse’s Oscar acceptance speech in 1973, the pair ‘had a lot of disputes … but on a night like this you start having affection for everybody’.  The director’s relationship with Jay Allen seems to have been even worse.  Constructing the script was a sizeable undertaking:  the film jettisons the stage Cabaret‘s book, making greater use of the characters and plot of I Am a Camera.  Although Allen received the sole screenplay credit with Hugh Wheeler named only as ‘research consultant’, Wikipedia says the latter was brought in to revise what Allen had written.  Whoever was actually responsible for the screenplay did a first-rate job.

The range of exceptional skills Fosse shows in Cabaret extends far beyond choreography.  Helped by the well-structured script and acute dialogue, his treatment of the various relationships outside the Kit Kat Klub is penetrating and assured, and he gets the very best out of the actors concerned.  The evolving courtship of Fritz and Nathalia is a good example of this.  The register of the early scenes involving them is lightly sardonic:  Nathalia’s English lesson with Brian, which turns into a supremely awkward tea party gatecrashed by Fritz and Sally, is one of this viewer’s favourite social-comedy sequences in any film – just about every line in it is witty and perfectly delivered.  When things start to get more complicated, Fritz tends to express himself in self-conscious romantic clichés (‘And I’m a crazy, lovesick fool …’).  Yet the affair grows, without strain, into a genuinely poignant one.  Michael York’s delivery of Brian’s lines occasionally conveys how the actor has decided to read them at the expense of what the character is feeling; for the most part, though, York is emotionally fine-tuned and expressive.   Fosse’s orchestration of the Sally-Brian-Maximilian triangle is particularly deft.   As the charming, complacent baron, Helmut Griem perfectly looks the part – he plays it perfectly too.  The cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and the film editor are major contributors to the calibre of Fosse’s work:  the lighting of the cabaret sequences and high-impact cutting and intercutting are still impressive today.

Cabaret was a critical and commercial success and won many prizes, including eight of the ten Academy Awards for which it was nominated[1].   There wasn’t universal praise, though.  For much of the upmarket British press in the early 1970s, the problem was Liza Minnelli.  In the original Isherwood story, Sally Bowles is an English girl with green nail varnish and no sense of moral responsibility.  She definitely can’t sing, even if her signal eccentricity makes her delivery of cabaret numbers striking.  Julie Harris was Sally in both the original Broadway production and the film of I Am a Camera.  Dorothy Tutin played her on stage in London.  Liza Minnelli auditioned several times for the part in the original Broadway Cabaret but Jill Haworth was eventually cast.  Judi Dench starred in the first production of Cabaret in the West End.  In other words, Minnelli was the first performer known primarily as a singer to take on the role – ‘far too good a singer to be convincing as a fifth-rate performer in a third-rate dive’.  George Melly in the Observer thought her ‘a thousand miles away from the Sally Bowles enigma’.  Clive James, in a broader criticism of the musical aspect, found Cabaret ‘excellent in the bits between the production numbers but showbiz drear when it sang and danced’[2].  James’s censure hints at an irritation some felt that Fosse traded in what Russell Davies  condemned as ‘nostalgie de la Bowles’.  The poster for the film – Minnelli in her ‘Mein Herr’ outfit, the strapline ‘a divinely decadent experience’ below – was seen as evidence of this, and of how much box-office fortunes were seen to depend on the star.  (The original trailer for the film, available on YouTube and which I don’t remember seeing before, illustrates that dependence too.)  At this distance in time, however, you need blinkers to see Cabaret as revelling in camp or Minnelli as eclipsing everything else in sight.

Christopher Isherwood himself reinforced objections to Minnelli in a BBC programme broadcast in April 1974[3]:  ‘Well, of course, [she] was marvellous in the cabaret scenes but, as everyone has pointed out, this professional performer and the sad, lost little girl outside the club, it just didn’t jell’.  In a later piece for the Times, Isherwood wrote of the ‘corruption’ of his creation by ‘Minnelli the star’.  The original author’s word in a case like this tends to be thought unanswerable but Isherwood’s criticism, and the similar objections of others, struck me, even as a teenager, as reflecting a misunderstanding of the film.  There’s an inherent problem in making a bad singer the protagonist of a musical only if the treatment is simply realistic.   That’s clearly not the nature of Fosse’s highly stylised Cabaret and Minnelli’s casting doesn’t need to be defended on the grounds of commercially aware poetic licence.  She sings so forcefully – on stage, is so much larger than life – that she becomes an image of what Sally Bowles wants to and will never be.

Minnelli’s four numbers in Cabaret are ‘Mein Herr’, ‘Maybe This Time (I’ll Be Lucky)’, the title song and the great ‘Money, Money’ duet with Joel Grey.  Whereas the last of these is primarily a display of dazzling dance and comic timing, the three solos foreground Minnelli’s vocal talents.  They also do more than that.   ‘Mein Herr’, in retrospect (within the film), represents a satirical description of Sally’s femme fatale pretensions.  (Later on, when their short-lived liaisons with Maximilian are on the point of collapse, Brian disparages her as ‘about as fatale as an after-dinner mint’.)  ‘Maybe This Time’ heralds the start of the unexpected sexual relationship between them.  The early parts of the number in the Klub are intercut with shots of the couple in the boarding house, exchanging banter after sex or smiles as a prelude to it.  By the time ‘Maybe This Time’ is halfway through, we’re partaking of Sally’s hope that maybe this time she’ll win; and the hope of being lucky in love fuses, thanks to Minnelli’s charisma and the camerawork, with the hope of professional dreams coming true.  Sally’s face is surrounded by warmly glowing stage lights.  The top of the costume she’s wearing – all that the close-up allows us to see – could be a star’s.  Then the camera pulls back to reveal plain black trousers beneath the patterned chemise and the nearly empty Kit Kat Klub beyond a stage that is suddenly small.  Her delusion is laid bare.  When Gavin Millar wrote (in the Listener) that Minnelli lacked the doomed-to-failure emotional power of her mother, he wasn’t wrong but that supposed minus is a dramatic plus in Cabaret.  If Judy Garland had sung ‘Maybe This Time’, her presence would have made a nonsense of the lyric before the first line was out of her mouth.

The more complex staging of ‘Cabaret’ also depends crucially for its power on the vocal authority of the performer.  There’s a bigger audience for this last number, in which Minnelli dramatises what Sally wants and who she is.  Close-ups again predominate but the movement of her outstretched arms and beckoning green-painted fingers that accompanies the ‘come to the cabaret’ invitation has an urgency verging on desperation.  The live-for-the-moment philosophy expressed in the lyrics is discomfiting after what we’ve seen in the preceding film.  In the climax to ‘Cabaret’, Minnelli is not only electrifying but as if electrified, charged by an energy beyond her control.  At the very end of the number, after irradiation in a barrage of flashing coloured lights, Sally stares briefly, almost in panic, at her audience before turning to leave the stage.  While she’s still in shot, the Emcee’s voice rasps onto the soundtrack to orchestrate the finale.

As well as enlarging the matter of Sally’s ill-founded ambition through the musical numbers, this Cabaret enriches the heroine by introducing a more obdurate egotism to underpin her madcap charm.   Isherwood, while alert to his Sally’s faults, is essentially affectionate towards her.  Some of those who’ve played her insist that, while she slept with men for money, Sally wasn’t a whore – just appealingly frivolous and ‘shocking’.  Her real-life inspiration was Jean Ross (1911-1973), whom Isherwood met in Berlin in the early 1930s and who, according to Wikipedia, ‘believed her popular association with the character of Sally Bowles overshadowed her life’s work in political activism’.  If this is right, Ross’s frustration was understandable:  a rather tiresome how-can-you-analyse-her-she’s-just-an-extraordinary-original aura obscures Sally.  Bob Fosse and the writer(s) make a virtue of this.  With no robust character definition to get in the way, they and Liza Minnelli create something stronger.  According to Minnelli:

‘I saw Julie Harris play her in I Am a Camera and she was great, but she played her like a campy butterfly.  I saw Sally as a girl with a terrible streak of selfishness in her.  Sally doesn’t want to be good – she just wants to be a star.’

Minnelli’s Sally is no butterfly but truly chameleon.  When thwarted or challenged, her exhausting exuberance switches to formidable sullenness.  When Sally is disappointed or exhausted, Minnelli’s oversized features seem to shrink with her hopes and she’s waiflike.  The result is a peculiarly astringent pathos – thanks to Sally’s innate tendency to self-dramatise, allied with an intermittent talent for acerbic insight.  She and Brian first go to bed together on a night that begins with Sally, her nail varnish removed, going out to meet her ‘fabulous, sexy, devastating’ father.  He fails to turn up and Brian returns bei Schneider to find Sally sitting – perhaps posing – crestfallen.   She reads Brian the telegram that explained her father’s no-show.

‘Ten words exactly. After ten it’s extra. You see, Daddy thinks of these things. If I had leprosy, there’d be a cable: “Gee, kid, tough. Sincerely hope nose doesn’t fall off. Love.” ‘

Liza Minnelli’s playing thoroughly justifies the Americanisation of Sally Bowles.

In what ways does Cabaret now look weaker than it used to?  Hardly any.  The handling of the openly political aspects of the material is mostly admirable.  The economic context is made clear, with economy.   The growth-of-Nazism episodes that supplement ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ are well done:  cross-cutting between a slap-dance on the Kit Kat Klub stage and, outside the cabaret, the beating up of the club manager who previously ejected a Nazi rattling a collection tin; Brian’s run-in with Herr Ludwig (Ralf Wolter) and Fräulein Mayr (Sigrid von Richthofen), the Völkischer Beobachter­-reading element in the Schneider household; the postscript to this exchange, when Fräulein Schneider (Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel) expresses nostalgia for the Kaiser (‘In those days, we had order’).   Helmut Griem’s expert natural line readings mask the over-explicitness of the baron’s reaction to the aftermath of lethal street violence, witnessed from the safety of his car:

 Maximilian:  The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans but they do serve a purpose.  Let them get rid of the Communists.  Later, we’ll be able to control them.

 Brian:  Who are ‘we’ exactly?

 Maximilian:  Why, Germany, of course.

Once or twice, a shot of something that seems meant to be glanced out of the corner of an eye – a little blonde-haired boy practising with a gun in a cornfield, for example – looks a shade too deliberate.  The montage signalling Sally’s visit to an abortionist was never a high point and still isn’t:  it’s one of the few bits that seems generic.  Watching the film this month, I wondered for the first time whether Jewish Fritz really could have successfully passed himself off as Gentile if sleeping around was high on his agenda.  In every other respect, the sexual relationships in the film are wholly convincing.  The understated presentation of the gay/bisexual ones, depicted with a degree of humour but a complete absence of excitement or relish for daring to include them, seems well ahead of its time.

Cabaret, for a variety of reasons, was the high point in the film life of each of the six main members of the cast.  Liza Minnelli soon proved too overpowering a performer (and/or too expensive a commodity) to build a career in cinema.  Michael York played D’Artagnan in Richard Lester’s popular ‘Musketeers’ trilogy and has made many more movies but, within a few years of Cabaret, the roles were getting smaller.  Helmut Griem was regarded chiefly as a stage actor in his native Germany, where he continued to do theatre, film and television:  he was rarely seen internationally after the mid-1970s.  (He died in 2004.)  Fritz Wepper too has continued to work regularly in German films and TV.  Marisa Berenson is different from the other five:   as a cinema image, she’s best known for a film other than Cabaret – Barry Lyndon (1975) – but it  requires imagination plus perversity to see her work in Kubrick’s film as an advance on what Fosse brought out of her.  (Pauline Kael memorably noted of Berenson in Barry Lyndon that ‘her hairdos change more often than her expressions’.)  Joel Grey’s small stature and abundant eccentricity made him tricky to cast in leading screen roles, though he’s had quite a few character parts, mostly on television.  Grey remains a big name in American musical theatre:  at the age of eighty-six, he’s currently preparing to direct a Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof.

Cabaret was also Bob Fosse’s zenith in cinema, though two of his three subsequent movies – Lenny (1974) and All That Jazz (1979) – were widely admired, the latter deservedly so.   (His last film was Star 80 (1983).)  Fosse, who died in 1987, is a legendary Broadway figure.  He won more Tonys for choreography (eight) than he directed feature films (five) but if Cabaret had been the only one it would have been more than enough.  As I watched it again after such a long interval, I was aware of both enjoying and concentrating on the film to a degree that, for me, is rare.  This picture is a rarity too:  an effortlessly entertaining work of art.  Back in the 1970s, I annoyed friends and family by going on and on about Cabaret, telling everyone it was the best film I’d ever seen – at a time when I hadn’t actually seen that many others.  It’s a surprise and a delight, decades and so many movies later, to feel that it’s still one of the best.  Thirty-odd viewings haven’t amounted to a moment of wasted time.

8 June 2018

[1] It won Best Director; Best Actress (Minnelli); Best Supporting Actor (Grey); Best Original Score/Adaptation Score; Best Cinematography; Best Film Editing; Best Art Direction; Best Sound.  It was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, both of which were won by The Godfather.

[2] Already the Guardian’s theatre critic, Michael Billington also wrote film reviews for The Illustrated London News in the 1970s.   If my old notes are to be believed, Billington disparaged Cabaret on very different grounds, comparing it unfavourably with Arthur Hiller’s Man of La Mancha chiefly on the basis that Cervantes was streets ahead of Isherwood!

[3] Part of a series called Success Story (further details on IMDB).