Cabaret is a 1972 American musical drama film directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse from a screenplay by Jay Presson Allen. It is based on the 1966 stage musical by Joe Masteroff (book) and the duo Kander and Ebb (music), which in turn was based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. It stars Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Marisa Berenson, and Joel Grey. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director for Fosse, Best Actress for Minnelli, and Best Supporting Actor for Grey. Multiple numbers from the stage score were used for the film, which also featured three other songs by Kander and Ebb, including two written for the adaptation.
In the traditional manner of musical theatre, most major characters in the stage version sing to express their emotions and advance the plot; in the film, however, the musical numbers are almost entirely diegetic (recognized by the characters themselves as musical numbers) and take place inside the club, with the exception of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", which is not performed in the club or by the club characters, but is still diegetic, a nationalistic song sung by a Nazi youth and the German crowd.
Cabaret was released in the United States on February 13, 1972, by Allied Artists. The film received critical acclaim and eventually earned more than $42 million in the box office against a production budget of $4.6 million. At the 45th Academy Awards, the film won in eight categories – including Best Director (Fosse), Best Actress (Minnelli), Best Supporting Actor (Grey), and Best Score – holding the record for most Oscars earned by a film not honoured for Best Picture. In 1995, Cabaret was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Plot In 1931 Berlin, a young, openly promiscuous American, Sally Bowles, performs at the Kit Kat Klub. A new British arrival in the city, Brian Roberts, moves into the boarding house where Sally lives. A reserved academic and writer, Brian must give English lessons to earn a living while completing his doctorate. Sally tries to seduce Brian, but he tells her that on three previous occasions he has tried to have sexual relationships with women, all of which failed. They become friends, and Brian witnesses Sally's bohemian life in the last days of the Weimar Republic. When Brian consoles Sally after her father cancels his meeting with her, they become lovers, concluding that his previous failures with women were because they were "the wrong three girls".
Maximilian von Heune, a rich, married playboy and baron, befriends Sally and takes her and Brian to his country estate where they are both spoiled and courted. After Brian and Max witness a Nazi song breaking out in a cafe, with all but one Patron joining in, Brian reminds Max that Max once told him the Nazis were harmless. Max drops his pursuit of the pair in haste. During an argument, Sally tells Brian that she has been having sex with Max, and Brian reveals that he has as well. Brian and Sally later reconcile, and Sally reveals that Max left them 300 marks and mockingly compares the sum with what a professional prostitute earns.
Sally learns that she is pregnant but is unsure of the father. Brian offers to marry her and take her back to his university life in Cambridge. At first, they celebrate their resolution to start this new life together, but after a picnic between Sally and Brian, in which Brian acts distant and uninterested, Sally becomes disheartened by the vision of herself as a bored faculty wife washing dirty diapers. Ultimately, she has an abortion, without informing Brian in advance. When he confronts her, she shares her fears, and the two reach an understanding. Brian departs for England, and Sally continues her life in Berlin, embedding herself in the Kit Kat Klub.
Meanwhile, Fritz Wendel, a German Jew passing as a Protestant Christian, is in love with Natalia Landauer, a wealthy German Jewish heiress who holds him in contempt and suspects his motives. Through Brian, Sally advises him to be more aggressive, which eventually enables Fritz to win her love. However, to gain her parents' consent for their marriage, Fritz must reveal his Jewish background, which he does, and the two are married by a rabbi.
The rise of Fascism in Europe is an ever-present undercurrent and is the overarching plot of the film. The progress of the primary characters can be tracked through their changing actions and attitudes towards the rising Nazism in the Weimar Republic. At the beginning of the film, a member of the Nazi Party is expelled from the Kit Kat Klub by the club manager, who suffers a subsequent beating.
The rise of Nazism in the 1930s is also demonstrated towards the end of the film in a rural beer garden scene. There, a blond boy sings to an audience of all ages ("Tomorrow Belongs to Me") about the beauties of nature and youth. It is eventually revealed that the boy is wearing a Hitler Youth uniform. The ballad then transforms into a militant Nazi anthem, and by the song's end, one by one nearly all of the adults and young people rise and join in the singing. "Do you still think you can control them?" Brian then asks Max. After the beer garden scene, Brian gets into a confrontation with a Nazi on a Berlin street, which leads to his receiving a beating.
In the final scene of the film in the Kit Kat Klub, it slowly becomes apparent in the hazy club that audience members wearing NSDAP uniforms are now sitting in the preferred front seats of the club.
Cast
Historical basis
The events depicted in the 1972 film are derived from the Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical tales of his colourful escapades in the Weimar Republic. In 1929, Isherwood visited his friend W. H. Auden in Weimar-era Berlin during the final year of the Golden Twenties. He soon relocated to Berlin to avail himself of the boy prostitutes found in the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.: Isherwood frequented "the boy-bars in Berlin in the late years of the Weimar Republic.... [He] discovered a world utterly different from the repressive English one he disliked, and with it, the excitements of sex and new subject matter." His expatriate social circle included Auden, poet Stephen Spender, and 19-year-old British flapper Jean Ross.
By early 1931, Isherwood shared modest lodgings with Ross, a cabaret singer and aspiring film actress. While rooming together in a boarding house in Berlin's Schöneberg quarter, a 27-year-old Isherwood settled into a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old German boy,: "...a sixteen-year-old Berliner named Heinz Neddermeyer... Isherwood realized that he 'had found someone emotionally innocent, entirely vulnerable...' In other words, he had found the person for whom he had been looking in all his relationships with adolescents." while Ross engaged in a series of sexual liaisons. After five or six months, the boarding house evicted Ross due to her sexual activities, and she moved in with a heroin addict. During this period, Isherwood and Ross purportedly met John Blomshield, a wealthy playboy who inspired the film character of Baron Maximilian von Heune. Blomshield sexually pursued both Isherwood and Ross. After inviting them on a trip abroad, he disappeared without saying goodbye.: "... the American thrilled them by inviting them to come with him to the States and then dashed their hopes by leaving Berlin abruptly, without saying goodbye."
In the summer of 1931, Ross became pregnant by jazz pianist and later actor Peter van Eyck. She underwent a near-fatal abortion facilitated by Isherwood, who pretended to be her impregnator. While Ross recovered from the botched abortion procedure, Germany's political situation deteriorated. As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right," Isherwood, Spender, and others realised that they must flee the country. "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled.
After the Enabling Act cemented Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, Isherwood fled Nazi Germany in May 1933.: "In the early hours of 13 May Isherwood sat down for the last time at his desk in Nollendorfstrasse and prepared to say goodbye to Berlin.... At six o'clock on the morning of 13 May 1933, Isherwood set off with Heinz for the Anhalterbahnhof..." Afterwards, the Nazis shuttered most of Berlin's seedy cabarets, and many of Isherwood's acquaintances fled abroad or perished in concentration camps. These factual events inspired Isherwood's Berlin stories, including his 1937 novella Sally Bowles, republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin. John Van Druten adapted Goodbye to Berlin into the 1951 play I Am a Camera, and Harold Prince produced it as the 1966 musical Cabaret.
Production Pre-production In July 1968, Cinerama made a verbal agreement to make a film version of the 1966 Broadway musical but pulled out in February 1969. In May 1969, Allied Artists paid a company record $1.5 million for the film rights and planned a company record budget. The cost of $4,570,000 was split evenly with ABC Pictures.
In 1971, Bob Fosse learned through Harold Prince, director of the original Broadway production, that Cy Feuer was producing a film adaptation of Cabaret through ABC Pictures and Allied Artists. It would be one of the last movies made by ABC. This was the first film produced in the revival of Allied Artists. Determined to direct the film, Fosse begged Feuer to hire him. However, Fosse had previously directed the unsuccessful film adaptation of Sweet Charity, a box office failure which made chief executives Manny Wolf and Marty Baum reluctant to hire him. Wolf and Baum preferred a more renowned or established director such as Billy Wilder, Joseph L. Mankiewicz or Gene Kelly.
Eager to hire Fosse, Feuer appealed to the studio heads, citing Fosse's talent for staging and shooting musical numbers, adding that if inordinate attention was given to filming the book scenes at the expense of the musical numbers, the whole film could fail. Fosse ultimately was hired. Over the next months, Fosse met with previously hired screenwriter Jay Presson Allen to discuss the screenplay.
Screenplay revisions As production neared, Fosse became increasingly dissatisfied with Allen's script, which was based on Joe Masteroff's original book of the stage version. Fosse hired Hugh Wheeler to rewrite and revise Allen's work. Wheeler was referred to as a "research consultant," and Allen retained screenwriting credit. Wheeler, a friend of Christopher Isherwood, knew that Isherwood had been critical of the stage musical due to its bowdlerisations of his material. Wheeler went back to Isherwood's original stories in order to ensure a more faithful adaptation of the source material. In particular, Wheeler restored the subplot about the gigolo and the Jewish heiress. Wheeler also drew on gay author Christopher Isherwood's openness about his homosexuality to make the leading male character a bisexual man "rather than the heterosexual as he had been in the stage musical."
Fosse decided to increase the focus on the Kit Kat Klub, where Sally performs, as a metaphor for the decadence of Germany in the 1930s by eliminating all but one of the musical numbers performed outside the club. The only remaining outside number is "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", a folk song rendered spontaneously by patrons at an open-air café. In addition, the show's original songwriters Kander and Ebb wrote two new songs, "Mein Herr" and "Money", and incorporated "Maybe This Time", a song they composed in 1964 and first released by Kaye Ballard.
Casting