dancingmike

If anyone outside of Broadway wasn't aware that Bob Fosse was a genius, Cabaret certainly let them know. Fosse took a beautiful "little" musical and saw immediately how to translate it into a film. Lots of us missed the romance of the landlady and the grocer, along with the lovely song, "Marriage", but the issue a hand was that Fosse and Kander and Ebb agreed the subject of the insidious rise of the Nazi movement needed to be handled in a much bigger way.

Bob Fosse's vision and instincts were perfect. Kander and Ebb wrote some new music. Joel Grey came from Broadway as the centerpiece of the film -- and he won a much deserved Oscar for his role as the ever so creepy emcee. The romance of the seniors was replaced by a romance between two younger Jews, one of whom is concealing that fact in an effort to avoid Nazi harassment. A very rich and very, very decedent character is introduced to underline the moral decrepitude of Sally Bowles and to facilitate displaying the downward spiral of Germany into the Nazi influence.

I've never thought Liza Minelli was a great actress and I still don't. She's a very talented performer, though not nearly so as her mother. Bob Fosse directed her performance in "the role of her life". He got everything she had and rolled it into Sally Bowles. Michael York could have been stronger, but that would not have fit his role. He was just a smart and very naive man who was an instrument of whichever character wanted to manipulate him. In fact, all but the Emcee and Sally Bowles are characters totally subjugated by the story.

The film takes us on a brilliant downward spiral ride with extraordinary music and the amoral emcee making sure we take notice of the fact we're on the road to hell. The rich German character is a sort of "assistant emcee" who does his job away from the cabaret. He makes sure we see that Sally Bowles cares nothing for anyone but herself, a self that is all veneer and no real substance.

Of all the scenes in the film, I recall one with a palpable shudder. It takes place on a beautiful day. The Sally Bowles menage-a-trois is off on a drive in the country and stops at an open air biergarten. A beautiful young Aryan boy in the Nazi youth organization rises to sing a song. His voice is even more beautiful than his appearance. The song, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" is a heart-stopping scary indicator of how far Germany has fallen under the Nazi influence. This scene is as scary and creepy a scene as I've ever watched in all my years of movie-going.

Bob Fosse was up against The Godfather when his Cabaret came out. There's no doubt The Godfather was a great film, but even with a projected tsunami of awards going its' way, all the key aspects of Cabaret beat it out. Liza Minelli won an Oscar for her morally bankrupt Sally Bowles. Joel Grey won an Oscar for his brilliant portrayal of the true heart of the musical, The Emcee. The cinematography, always perfect, often totally off the charts brilliant won an Oscar. And, of course, Bob Fosse won his Oscar for best director.

What a shame Bob Fosse always burned his candle at both ends -- and with the force of a flamethrower. If he had managed to stay with us longer his body of work might have shone at least as bright, if not the brightest, of all film directors. Did anyone out there see his biography-pic of Lenny Bruce? Not everything he did was a film musical. On Broadway his light as a dancer/choreographer/director shines so bright that even today you need to wear dark glasses to look at it. His first film set a new standard for film musicals, and set the bar so high I wonder if anyone will even approach it. Such was his brilliance, such is the brilliance of his Cabaret.

Most of the comments already in place reflect my feelings about this film. It's representative of the genre of films that required the audience to participate in the "horror". Let's face it, there's nothing that can exceed the scary images or situations we can conjure in our minds. It's sad that this approach as been all but abandoned.

I put Cat People and Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the top of my list in this approach to horror. Hitchcock, of course, is in another league. In Body Snatchers, critters from somewhere or other are replacing humans with their own kind by putting "pods" beside the beds at night, and the creature in the pod absorbs the body of the human overnight. It took me years before I could look at a collection of watermelons -- even in grocery stores -- and not think of them as pods. The director's approach required my participation which, in return, scared the hell out of me, even to the point of carrying it with me for years after I'd seen the film.

I guess these comments are more along the line of telling a story on myself. The first horror double feature I ever saw was Frankenstein and Cat People. I was 11 or 12 at the time and thought I was quite the cool character. If I got scared at either film (which I did, especially Cat People) I was too cool to let it show. As my friend and I were walking home from the movies (having spent our bus fare on sweets) we heard a clatter from a house we were passing and then some loud and angry cat noises. My friend and I took off like we were shot from guns! He and I both went into an every person for themselves mode and ran all the way home. I ran into my home, locked the door and then ran up to my bedroom, put some furniture in front of my door and jumped under the covers. So much for being Mr.Cool! I hadn't any need for the gore in the second coming of Cat People.

I didn't need to see an arm ripped off to be scared. Give me a film that gets me involved, not one that has to show me everything so I can turn my brain off. The 1942 version far exceeds the later version in delivering true horror. Why do you think the otherwise marginal Blair Witch Project did so well at the box office? We never actually saw the witch except in our own mind's eye. Let's have more "thinking people's" horror films. I'd like to be scared for real again!