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Created Sep 06, 2009 01:50AM PST • Edited May 02, 2021 12:58AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   This paean to lost licentiousness in the face of fascism won eight (8!) Oscars, losing out only on Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (both to The Godfather for Pete’s sake). The movie that made Liza more famous for her talent than her mother, Cabaret comes across as cutely chaste by 21st Century standards, yet still stands as a great, significant and meaningful entertainment.

   Musicals don’t often break through as massive mainstream hits, and none have since this one.¹ It’s hard to imagine one ever doing so again.
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   ¹ Saturday Night Fever being a dance show, not a true musical where the players actually sing.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Liza Minnelli peaked here, briefly becoming a superstar just as the 70s dawned. This perfectly positioned her to spend the rest of the Me Decade coked-out in the back of Studio 54.

   Notwithstanding several later successes, making it here entitled her to make it anywhere, including originating New York, New York five years later.¹ Why not?

   Sally Bowles remains the prime signature role in movie history. They can’t ever take that from her.

   Joel Grey – so fecund for so long – probably also peaked here as The Master of Ceremonies. Deft, agile and sweetly wicked, he’s maniacally upbeat in the midst of downbeat surrounds. He has to carry the first part of the show as the star who opens the movie with his sneakily engaging Welcome. Liza doesn’t appear till later and doesn’t really sing till much later.

   Michael York embodies the pretty, prissy Brit.

   Marisa Berenson naturally inhabits the refined lady of the city who must endure the biggest and most cruel comedown.
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   ¹ Sinatra appropriated New York, New York from Liza, though they were known to perform it together. Imagine that!

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Bob Fosse’s Masterpiece: All that jazz he had went into this – his huge breakout hit. Going where few if any choreographers have gone – then or now – Fosse rang the bell as an Oscar winning director (the Academy not making a category of choreography as the Tonys do, or he’d surely have won that also).

    If the notion of choreography seems silly, it won’t after watching Cabaret. Just look at Liza’s single footed chair perch in the poster above. That ain’t normal, plus it achieves a titillating delight in the moves that precede and come after it. The guy’s a Move and Pose, Pose and Move genius.

    Choreography sure. His story direction also deserves Oscar recognition.

    Plus, a period piece to boot: Old Berlin, as if you could touch and smell it. Sure it’s his kind of milieu, but he still had to recreate it. Which he did to a tee. Bravo.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Perfect 5.0

    Life is a wild ride. Oops, does the song have it differently?

    Kander and Ebb’s songs remain breakthrough almost half a century later. Mostly sung by Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, they comprise as great a songbook as just about any show ever, and are nicely naughty to boot. To cite just three:

    • Life is a Cabaret from the title song anchors one of the most recognizable stanzas in popular music.
    • Willkommen to open the movie, consummately delivered by Joel Grey.
    • Maybe This Time shows off Liza’s warm and sinuous pipes, every bit the equal of her mother Judy Garland’s.

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.1

    Sex, sex, sex, but no real – you know – sex. Few movies obsess about sex as much as this one. Amoral sex, casual sex, kinky sex, gay sex, straight sex: Life is a cabaret ol’ chum, don’t you know. All this in a movie with no sex. Not a bare breast, nor a bare bottom. No petting, heavy or otherwise. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

    Good humored ribaldry it’s got in spades. The deed itself, look elsewhere.

17. Sex Titillating 2.5

    All talk. No action.

18. Violence Fierce 1.6

19. Rudeness Salty 2.1

21. Reality

    Glib 1.3

    Life during wartime brings great movies to mind: Inglorious Basterds, Defiance, Lust Caution and of course Casablanca, the greatest of them all. Cabaret stands with them, depicting the wild side of early Nazi Berlin as Hitler’s minions began to overrun the country. The movie deftly invokes how the Nazis took particular aim at those they demonized: Jews mostly, but also gays and the artistic.

    Based on two short novels by Christopher Isherwood known as The Berlin Stories, the movie illuminates the tension between two forms of political evil incarnate – Communism and Nazism. What a bleak choice. Both bring death.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Glib 1.3

24. Physical Natural 1.0