Cabaret Film Notes

“In here, life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful!” Joel Grey’s emcee beckons from the cool darkness of the Kit Kat Club’s stage. Everything in Cabaret certainly looks beautiful. It’s all designed to dazzle: the direction from the iconic Bob Fosse, the spidery lashes of Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles, the glittering costumes that sizzle with every choreographed moment on screen. It is also designed to unnerve. Like the stage show that the movie is adapted from, the surface-level gorgeousness of 1930s Berlin belies the rot of fascism that’s festering just below, until it can no longer be ignored or delayed by the excess everyone wants to retreat into. 

Populated by compelling and vivacious characters like nightclub performer Sally, and writer Brian Roberts (Michael York), Cabaret shows us how every person, no matter how much they try to ignore or dismiss it, is eventually affected in some way by the damage inflicted by rising fascism. Even the musical numbers here, beautiful until they feel more like a slap to the face than a caress, are not just set dressing made to distract. Their progression charts the progression of social attitudes as the rise of Nazism begins to bleed into the characters’ lives. 
We watch as Sally, Brian, and company live their lives, fascism like a petulant fly buzzing around them until they can no longer ignore it. When we finally realize later in the film, mouths dry with fear and realization, that the people singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” at a beer garden are uniformed Nazis and average citizens in sync with each other, it’s too late. The lessons of Cabaret, although it has been part of the cultural lexicon for so long, are still valuable today. As you watch the movie, whether it’s your first time or your fiftieth, remember that we can’t retreat into opulence to combat the darkness—we can only face it together.

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