Cabaret
Heil to the Chief

2,475 words

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking… Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Christopher Isherwood, A Berlin Diary

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome,
Im cabaret, au cabaret, to cabaret.
Cabaret

Like schnitzel und schnapps, cinema and the Nazis go well together. For Hollywood, they have always been the go-to bad guys in a way that Communists, for example, have not. Tinseltown has even produced iconic silver-screen Nazis. Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca, Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, and the gloriously – glouriously? – camp Hans Landa in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Nazis appeal to filmgoers in a unique way, and it is unlikely that any woman ever had rape fantasies about the Gurkhas.

Bob Fosse’s 1972 movie Cabaret is, in part, about the Nazification of Germany viewed from its epicenter in Berlin. Fosse himself was an ex-burlesque dancer, and so a musical was inevitable. The film is a hybrid of Christoper Isherwood’s 1939 collection of stories, Goodbye to Berlin, and a 1951 Broadway stage play, I am a Camera, which John van Druten adapted from Isherwood, or “Herr Izzyvoo”, as his German landlady calls him in the Berlin stories. The part of Sally Bowles in the stage musical had been offered to Julie Andrews, whose agent turned it down on the grounds of the character’s immorality. Andrews was more suited to singing in the Swiss Alps.

The movie opens – and closes – with the sinister face of the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit-Kat Klub, a decadent 1930s Berlin nightclub. The opening number introduces the dancing girls and orchestra, a Breughellian gallery of painted grotesques, and intercuts with the arrival in Berlin of Brian Roberts, an English academic and clearly Christopher Isherwood. Roberts is played by Michael York, one of those English actors well described by the late English novelist Martin Amis as “pointlessly handsome”, with his blond floppy hair and cut-glass vowels. York had made his breakthrough four years previously as Tybalt in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and although he has worked steadily since, Cabaret remains his biggest movie.

Roberts takes a room in a boarding-house and meets Sally Bowles, a nightclub singer and proverbial loose woman. Bowles is famously played by Liza Minnelli, and is coquettish and tomboyish, introducing Roberts to a world clearly some way outside his English comfort zone. Visiting the Kit-Kat Klub where Sally sings, Roberts is flirted with by a transvestite, a fact he confirms when s/he enters the bathroom and stands next to him at the urinal. When Brian and Sally observe a randy old goat being propositioned by the man – no personal pronouns back then – Sally remarks, “Wait until he gets a load of what little old Elke’s got”.

Sally is obviously attracted to Brian, and one of her numbers is a classic show tune, Maybe This Time, which laments past and failed affairs but looks optimistically forward to the next one. In the main Isherwood story in which Sally appears, her singing is barely mentioned, except to note that she doesn’t have a particularly good voice, but Minnelli’s bold, brassy delivery is able to retreat into the sultry, and was a big part of the film’s success and her Oscar. One small detail that makes it from Isherwood to Cabaret is Sally’s revolting green nail varnish, which Isherwood remarks makes her hands look as though beetles had alighted on them. Sally also has une mouche, a “fly”, as the French call a “beauty spot”, high on her cheek, and traditionally indicating flirtatiousness.

At the Kit-Kat Klub, we get our first Nazi sighting, as a party worker looks for donations. He is thrown out by one of the clientele, who we later see being beaten up by Nazis, a scene intercut with a mock-wrestling match between two gross lesbians at the Kit-Kat. The camera flashes on the MC imitating Hitler, having donned the trademark comical moustache.

Brian is gay – as was Isherwood – although, as it transpires, actually bisexual. After initially rebuffing Sally, the pair sleep together, a major difference from Goodbye to Berlin. A heterosexual love interest is, of course, essential to a Hollywood movie, and even fresh from the “liberated” 60s (although a decade that actually sold us into chains) Tinseltown wasn’t ready for gay cinema just yet. Sally Bowles is one of the great, tragic, doomed, studio-apartment, Western literary anti-heroines, more fated females than femmes fatales. Pitched somewhere between Holliday Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Nicola Six in Martin Amis’ London Fields, Sally has the added attraction of talent.

Halfway through Cabaret, the obligatory love rival appears in the form of Maximillian von Heure, a fabulously rich playboy who entrances Sally and frustrates Brian, although the ménage à trois that develops further complicates the plot sexually. The songs in Cabaret dovetail superbly with the plotline, and Max’s arrival is followed by the brilliant roundel duet between Sally and the MC, Money Makes the World Go Round. The film also features the delightful “singing saw”, something I have only ever seen elsewhere in 1991’s strange but rewarding movie Delicatessen. A panel saw – the big, wobbly one – is played with a violin bow, producing a mournful keening note like a Theremin, and whose pitch can be changed by bending the blade. I’d love to know if anyone has seen that done in real life, whatever that is.

Cabaret’s second half also ramps up the growing power and presence of the Nazis. This is an aspect of the film which remains faithful to Isherwood, as details aggregate and the full extent of the coming Nazi reign begins to reveal itself. Isherwood was famously politically neutral and objective about the coming of the Reich, noting small and apparently insignificant occurrences without drawing out their implications, such as on a visit to the beach in A Berlin Diary:

“There are the German city-flags — Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden, Rostock and Berlin, as well as the National, Republican and Nazi colours. Each chair is encircled by a low sand bulwark upon which the occupants have set inscriptions in fir-cones: Waldesruh. Familie Walter. Stahlhelm. Heil Hitler!”

Brian, the movie Isherwood, is understandably more resistant to Nazification, in line with Hollywood morality. Max is somewhat more pragmatic. “The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans”, he says, “but they do serve a purpose”, that purpose being, of course, to keep Communism in check. Viewed from our own position in history, that didn’t work out too well.

A scene between Brian and Max has far more sexual tension than any involving Sally, and leads to the film’s greatest line, as we see Sally and Brian argue over the playboy. Brian spits out his disgust. “Screw Maximillian!”, he says. “I do”, replies Sally. Roberts looks at her steadily and says, “so do I”.

That the Nazis were in Germany to stay – at least temporarily – is announced with a quite beautiful song in a park, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, in which a young and perfectly Aryan boy leads the chorus before heiling Hitler, and ordinary Germans stand and join in. This would later be controversially covered by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, although Harvey changes the lyric from “O Fatherland” to “O Father”. As Max and Brian leave the park, the academic asks of Max, “Do you still think you can control them?” The scene reminds me of sitting in the Englisher Garten in Munich 10 years ago listening to an “Oom-Pah” band (Oom-Pah is what the Germans did to waltz time). They didn’t play Tomorrow Belongs to Me for obvious reasons, but myself and friends sat with our vast steins of the excellent Munich lager – brewed by law using only natural ingredients, unlike the chemical rubbish one drinks in London – and listened to a selection of heavy metal songs. If you haven’t heard a German Oom-Pah band in lederhosen perform Smoke on the Water and Whole Lotta Love, you really haven’t lived. Actually, we had to be careful in Munich. One of my buddies is something of an expert on the Nazis – they had visited Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest on a previous trip – and when we visited what was reputedly der Führer’s favorite tavern, we had to be wary of mentioning Adolf by name. We settled on a pseudonym so as not to anger the locals or alert the Poleizi, and referred to him not as “the Austrian painter” (as do YouTube commenters to avoid the algorithm) but with the Irish phrase, “Yer man”. Aber ich schweife ab. But I digress.

Back in Berlin, Max promises Sally and Brian he will take them to Africa and then deserts them, leaving Sally pregnant and not knowing which of her two lovers is the father. She pays for an abortion with a fur coat Max gave her, and Roberts realizes that this really is goodbye to Berlin. In the meantime, the Kit-Kat Klub becomes the movie’s litmus for the rise of the Nazis, and the song If You Could See Her features the MC with a cowled wife who turns out to be a gorilla. As the pair cavort on stage, the MC sings:

If you could see her through my eyes
You wouldn’t wonder at all.
If you could see her through my eyes
I guarantee you would fall
Like I did.

For the final line, the MC hisses in a whisper to the audience: “If you could see her through my eyes. Se vouldn’t look Jewish at all”.

One of Brian’s fellow tenants voices something implicitly disapproved of in the movie, but increasingly clear today. Someone asks, at dinner: “If all the Jews are bankers, the how can they be Communists too?”

Another replies: “If they can’t destroy us one way, they try the other”.

Precisely, mein Herr.

The Kit-Kat Klub has converted to the new order. In a sub-plot, Brian’s friend is trying to marry into a monied family, but the object of his affection has to leave Germany as her dog is killed by Nazis, and “Juden” painted on her house. Despite fist-fighting with Nazi officials, Brian knows when to get out while the getting is good, and for his own reasons rather than his bloodline, it is time to be gone.

I don’t remember when I first saw Cabaret, but it was before I read Isherwood and certainly before I went to Berlin myself in the mid-1980s to visit a girlfriend, curiously enough also named Sally. I saw a production of Cabaret at my university in which she played one of the chorus girls, and she took one of the female parts in the saucy Kit-Kat number Two Ladies. I loved Berlin, and it still had enough of the twilit demi monde about it to be reminiscent of the atmosphere of the film. We went to transvestite clubs with interlinking telephones on the numbered tables, just like the Kit-Kat. One night, Sally and I took a laundry marker and graffitied our names on the Berlin Wall. When it came down in 1989, tourists fought amidst the rubble for pieces of the old division between East and West, and I like to think that there is, perhaps, an old couple in Wisconsin who have our chunk above their fireplace, looking at it from time to time and wondering who Mark and Sally were. Perhaps they thought it was Sally Bowles. One reason I know to a certainty that I had seen Cabaret before my visit to Berlin is that Sally – my Sally, not Ms. Bowles – knew exactly where one of the scenes was filmed. Minnelli drags York underneath one of Berlin’s overground sections of its underground railway, and they both scream as the train thunders overhead. We went and recreated the scene.

This time around, I read the Isherwood first and had forgotten how much I enjoyed his writing. Goodbye to Berlin is really only novella-length, and I read it over the course of Christmas Day before I watched the movie. Sally Bowles is obviously the standout character because of the movie, but Isherwood is a fine observer of psychological detail expressed through action – Gore Vidal called him the greatest of prose writers – although his relationship with Sally is strictly non-sexual, as noted.

Any relationship with a failed actress will be strewn with problems, and I know whereof I speak. I was “romantically linked” – as the better class of British newspaper puts it – with an American of the species for some time, and then I married a half-caste British thespian who never got anywhere near making the grade, save for a couple of TV dramas no-one watched except her. Both productions bombed, from a personal perspective. The problem is, where they under-acted in the view of the casting director in their quest for the limelight, wannabee actresses tend to over-act in real life. So it is with Sally Bowles.

As for Cabaret, this is the point at which MSM journalists are obliged to go through the ritual of virtue-signaling, or “wirtue signaling”, as the MC of the Kit-Kat Klub might put it. You know the drill. Hitler and the Nazis were the most evil creatures ever to exist, and the Holocaust the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated. Well, sure. File it with the rest. Moralizing over movies, art, and literature is redundant, the wrong tool for the wrong job. Morality is like cheap scent. You can tolerate a little, when worn by someone you like, but too much of its reek makes you feel sick. If you watch a movie through the lens of morality, you are not really watching the movie, you are watching yourself, which can, on occasion, be rather dull. Criticism of this sort is better served operating, as another famous German put it, jenseits gut und böse, or “beyond good and evil”. Hitler owned Nietzsche’s walking-stick, gifted to him by the philosopher’s wretched sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and it was probably the only thing about Nietzsche der Führer actually, and quite literally, grasped. Morality is fine at a local level, but doesn’t function so well in macro terms, like a wrist-watch or a garden rake.

If you are a fan of movie musicals, which I most certainly am, then you will undoubtedly have seen Cabaret. If you haven’t seen it, the film is a shining example of what I consider to be Hollywood’s greatest decade, and the Academy agreed. Cabaret set a record, receiving the most Oscars of any movie not itself awarded Best Picture. That honor, in 1972, went to The French Connection, but Cabaret saw eight Oscars, including director Fosse, Minnelli, and Joel Grey as Best Supporting Actor for his role as the MC. It’s a splendid musical, a good political film, a reverent (although very selective) homage to a great English writer, and wonderfully entertaining. For a couple of hours, life is a cabaret, old chum, so come to the cabaret.