Cabaret (1972)

2 years ago

Cabaret (1972)

LIFE IS A CABARET

by Letitia Trent

When I was a child, before our family caught on to cassette tape players (we were always late to technology), my mother owned a stack of mildewed records, all of which she played over and over again until they skipped and crackled. Her favorite record by far was the soundtrack to Cabaret. The record cover fascinated me—Liza Minelli, in her strange, precise pixie haircut, her black eyeliner, red lips, and black bowler hat and fishnets, was a creature I hadn’t ever encountered in real life. She was over-the-top, glamorous, and far from our cramped, dumpy trailer in the woods of Vermont. Taken outside of the film or play, the Cabaret soundtrack is cheerful and tongue-and-cheek, and the ending number, ” Life is a Cabaret”, sounds like a rousing affirmation of the kind of life that Sally Bowles represents—a restless searching for thrill and glamor.

Years later, we owned a VHS copy Cabaret. For a few months in the summer of 1998, I watched it almost every weekend while my parents were off flea-marketing in Texas and I was left behind at home. The older I got, the more I realized that my mother and I had been watching a different movie for years. I saw a movie about the attraction and revulsion to glamour and sex, ethics and desire, and a particularly frightening historical moment. She saw a movie about dancing and singing and a plucky heroine overcoming obstacles.

Cabaret is a macabre musical set in a sinister place (the slummier rooming houses and clubs Germany) in a sinister time (1930, just as the Nazis began to rise to power). The music is worked into the film as numbers performed at the Kit Kat club, where our heroine Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli), is a headliner. The opening sequence, where the fantastic Joel Gray as the Master of Ceremonies introduces the audience to the ladies of the Cabaret, is a masterpiece of the grotesque—the women saunter out slowly in corpse-like makeup, their lingerie in rags, and gyrate blank-faced as the music oozes a beat too slowly and Gray walks the stage, slapping and pinching them, commenting on their virginity. Cabaret looks dirty; it doesn’t glam up the sleaziness of Sally’s surroundings.

Cabaret takes place in the counterculture of German life, amongst pornographers, prostitutes, and con artists, but it also tackles the increasing persecution of Jews and other “outsiders” (homosexuals, communists) by the Nazi party. The threat of nationalism and Nazi control creeps closer and closer as the movie progresses. In one of the most frightening sequences, the film brings us to an innocent-looking picnic in the country. When a boy with an angelic voice stands up to sing a song titled “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and the onlookers - normal, everyday people, farmers and country folk - begin to rise and raise their arms in that now-unmistakable salute, both the characters in the film and the viewers are reminded that sinister things can come in innocent packages.

It’s hard to think of Liza Minelli now as anything but a boozy parody of her 70’s self, but she was at her best in Cabaret as the American ex-pat Sally Bowles. Minelli isn’t traditionally beautiful, but she’s magnetic in this film, and her manic and driven Sally is a perfect balance of selfishness, neediness, and ambition. She wants to be a star, preferably in movies, and is willing to do most anything to achieve this goal, but she is also acutely lonely, a rich girl abandoned by her parents. When the shy, extremely-British Brian shows up in her boarding house to teach English, it’s clear that she’ll eat him up whole, dazzle him, and spit him out the moment he gets in the way of her goals. She’s like a hurricane—there doesn’t seem to be anything at the center of her frantic primping, aggressive sexuality, and constant performance.

I recently re-watched Cabaret. Strangely, it’s one of my feel-good movies, one I can watch over and over again. Most of us, thank god, don’t live the kind of life portrayed in this film, but the possibility of destroying oneself is still inexplicably attractive (just look at the cover of any gossip magazine in the grocery store). Now, I understand why I watched it hundreds of times that summer ten years ago—I wanted to get close to the possibility of a glamorous, destructive life, one where you wake up every morning and regret the pills and the gin and the sex until you set off to do it all over again the next night.