CRITIQUE:

As Hollywood approached the decade of 70’s, the musical genre became increasingly stagnant as an overlooked pond. Year after year, studios churn musical pictures one after another like a processing machine, desperate to cash in some mighty box-office returns, wishing to repeat the mid-60’s success of The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. This was a period reigned by the Queen of Late-60’s musicals, Barbara Streisand, taking over Julie Andrews’ throne, hired to keep the Hollywood jukebox engine running. Whilst showcasing good performances, musicals in this period critically undermine audience expectations and social resonance, with Oscars the only seeming body still left unfazed by the cultural revolution looming on the horizon. This sign of desperation reaches to a breaking point when Hollywood gives Clint Eastwood a paycheck to sing in Paint Your Wagon, a grunting tip-off to amass more audience in the musical bandwagon.

It was until Bob Fosse’s Cabaret arrived and changed the face of the musical genre forever. Being the first musical to receive the Rating X, it revivifies the old, stale virtuousness of a bygone era and instead features crucially complex characters that defy any social and moral linearity, befitting an age with counterculturalism as its most pinnacle spirit. Its setting, the decadent period of the 30’s Weimar Republic, seems to mirror the growingly cynical 70’s zeitgeist, with Vietnam War, presidential assassinations and hippie movement spreading morass in the streets of America, and Cabaret must have been a shock to the old Hollywood musical system. Its central protagonist, Sally Bowles, an American émigré in Berlin and a star performer in the notorious, prostitution hot-spot Kit Kat Club, is certainly no soul-saving nun or saint Hollywood is accustomed in seeing. She’s a free-spirited egotist, a female gigolo who eschews any notion of settling down and a proposal of a brighter Cambridge future for a lavish, debauched life. And she does this all with a flourish of her emerald-painted fingernails, chirping “Divine decadence, darling!” When she’s not performing on-stage, she has tentative flings, left, right and front centre, and even falls into a ménage-a-trois much darker than Jules et Jim, one with an English language tutor Brian (played to a finesse by Michael York) and another, a German baron Maximilian (an equally wanton character played by Helmut Griem. If the complexity doesn’t stun us enough, there is also a criss-crossing of relationships with Brian gratifying his bisexual pleasures with Max.

Here, sexualities are blurred and characters are as ambiguous as they come, and this largely due to a cunningly crafted screenplay where characters and the status quo that lay amongst them are implied rather than shown. The musical set-pieces aren’t even tailored to fit the proceedings where characters break out into a song, but rather used as vignettes to reflect the irony, delight, despair and other moods suited to the increasingly darkening storyline, with Fosse flashing out an incredible editing flair. As this is set during the rise of the Third Reich, it is daring to create a film that does not touch the subject first-hand but through implications, where the Kit Kat Club’s stage becomes a showground of satire with the Master of Ceremonies (a terrific, grandstanding Oscar-winning performance by Joel Grey) portraying the ruthless moral anarchy eating the world outside the cabaret. The songs “Money Makes The World Go Round” and “Bye Bye Mein Herr” are few of the showstoppers that savagely and scathingly parodies the depravity of pre-Second World War Berlin. “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”, the only musical piece set outside the cabaret is sung by a young German soldier, an unexpected, fomenting sequence that is as chilling as what it foreshadows in history.

But through and through, this is Minelli’s show, proving that she can also act and create a credible character onscreen, one that is still as haunting as of today, tantamount to her vocal prowess. Her expressionistic performance, a self-conscious homage to the provocateur beauties of German expressionism such as Marlene Dietrich, is meticulously observed, seesawing from warmth, grace then sharply turns theatrical at the hint of emotional ease. This élan is ultimately, stunningly showcased in Sally Bowles’ final number “Life is a Cabaret”, a witty yet sinister bow from this woman who realises her self-inflicted tragedy, for this song begins as an exultant number and then slowly descends into pathos. For an intense moment, the lights changes into a fiery red as she sings the final notes in a cry of desperation, deafened by a time of extreme desperate measures.

VERDICT:

RATING: A+