Only a few numbers from the stage score were used for the film; Kander and Ebb wrote new ones to replace those that were discarded. After the box office failure of his film version of in 1969, Bob Fosse bounced back with Cabaret in 1972, a year that would make him the most honored director in the movie business. The film also brought Liza Minnelli, the daughter of and , her own first chance to sing on screen, and she won the. With Academy Awards for , , , , , and , Cabaret holds the. In addition to its eight Oscars, it won Best Picture citations from the and the , and took honors for Grey from the National Board of Review, the Hollywood Foreign Press, and the. In 1931 Berlin, young American performs at the Kit Kat Klub. A new British arrival in the city, Brian Roberts , moves into the boarding house where Sally lives. A reserved and writer, Brian gives English lessons to earn a living, while completing his doctorate. Sally tries seducing Brian, and suspects he may be. Brian tells Sally that on three previous occasions he has tried to have sexual relationships with women, all of which failed. They become friends, and Brian witnesses Sally's anarchic, life in the last days of the. Sally befriends Maximilian von Heune, a rich playboy baron who takes her and Brian to his country estate; it becomes ambiguous which of the duo Max is seducing. After a sexual experience with Brian, Max loses interest in the two, and departs for Argentina. During an argument, when Sally tells Brian that she has been having sex with Max, Brian reveals that he has as well. Brian and Sally later reconcile, and Sally reveals that Max left them money and mockingly compares the sum with what a professional prostitute gets. Sally learns that she is pregnant, but is unsure of the father. Brian offers to marry her and take her back to his university life in. At first, they celebrate their resolution to start this new life together, but after a picnic between Sally and Brian, in which Brian acts distant and uninterested, Sally becomes disheartened by the vision of herself as a bored faculty wife washing dirty diapers. Ultimately, she has an abortion, without informing Brian in advance. When he confronts her, she shares her fears, and the two reach an understanding. Brian departs for England, and Sally continues her life in Berlin, embedding herself in the Kit Kat Club. A concerns Fritz Wendel , a German Jew as a Christian, who is in love with Natalia Landauer , a wealthy heiress, who holds him in contempt and suspects his motives. The worldly Sally gives him advice, which eventually enables Fritz to win her love. However, in order to get her parents' consent for their marriage, Fritz must reveal his true religious and ethnic background — a highly dangerous act, considering what is in store for Jews under the coming Nazi regime. Although the Nazis are not yet in power, some of them kill Natalia's beloved dog one night. The Nazis' violent rise is a powerful, ever-present undercurrent in the film. Their progress can be tracked through the characters' changing actions and attitudes. While in the beginning of the film, Nazis are sometimes harassed and even kicked out of the Kit Kat Klub, the final shot of the film shows the cabaret's audience is dominated by uniformed members. The rise of the Nazis is also dramatically demonstrated in the rural scene. The camera shifts to show that the singer is wearing a brown uniform. As the gentle a capella ballad gradually transforms into a harsh and militant Nazi anthem, one by one, nearly all the adults and young people watching rise and join in the singing. The song culminates with the singer donning his Hitler Youth cap and lifting his hand in the. They also drew on original author Christopher Isherwood's openness about his homosexuality to make the leading male character, a writer modeled on him, a bisexual who shares his bed and a male lover with Sally. Fosse decided to increase the focus on the Kit Kat Klub, where Sally performs, as a metaphor for the decadence of Germany in the 1930s by eliminating all but one of the musical numbers performed outside the club. Minnelli had auditioned to play Sally in the original Broadway production. Some involved with the show say she was too inexperienced at the time, though she had already won Broadway's Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Others have suggested that she was too big a presence for the role as written on Broadway. By the time Cabaret reached the screen, however, Minnelli was a major film star, having won an Oscar nomination as the emotionally damaged college student in 1969's. In 1971, learned through , director of the original Broadway production, that was producing a of Cabaret through and. This was the first film produced in the revival of Allied Artists. Determined to direct the film, Fosse urged Feuer to hire him. Chief executives Manny Wolf and preferred a bigger name director such as or. That Fosse had directed the unsuccessful film adaptation of Sweet Charity gave Wolf and Baum pause. Feuer appealed to the studio heads, citing Fosse's talent for staging and shooting musical numbers, adding that if inordinate attention was given to filming the book scenes at the expense of the musical numbers, the whole film could fail. Fosse was ultimately hired. Over the next months, Fosse met with previously hired writer Jay Allen to discuss the screenplay. Dissatisfied with Allen's script, he hired to rewrite and revise her work. The final script was based less on 's original book of the stage version, and more on The Berlin Stories and I Am a Camera. Fosse and Feuer traveled to , where producers chose to shoot the film, in order to finish assembling the film crew. During this time, Fosse highly recommended for cinematographer, but Feuer and the top executives saw Surtees's work on Sweet Charity as one of the film's many artistic problems. Producers eventually chose British cinematographer. Designers , and served as production designers. Charlotte Flemming designed costumes. Fosse dancer , Louise Quick and John Sharpe were brought on as Fosse's dance aides. Fosse was given the option of using Grey as Master of Ceremonies or walking away from the production. Fosse hired as Sally Bowles's openly bisexual love interest. Several smaller roles, as well as the remaining four dancers in the film, were eventually cast in Germany. Filming Rehearsals and filming took place entirely in. For reasons of economy, indoor scenes were shot at in , outside. Location shooting took place in and around Munich and West Berlin, and in and. Editing was done in Los Angeles before the eventual theatrical release in February 1972. The voice heard on the radio reading the news throughout the film in German was that of associate producer , whose father made such notable films as 1931 , 1933 , and 1931. This section possibly contains. Please by the claims made and adding. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. March 2015 The film is significantly different from the Broadway musical. In the film version, she is American. The character of Cliff Bradshaw was renamed Brian Roberts and made British as was Isherwood, upon whom the character was based rather than American as in the stage version. In the film, Sally is a very good singer, whereas the stage version often portrays her as being untalented. Kander and Ebb had written it years earlier for , thus it was ineligible for an nomination. All tracks written by. Cabaret: Original Soundtrack Recording No. Title Performer Length 1. Some of these selections are used as instrumentals as gramophone selections. The film was immediately successful at the box office. Part of its success comes because it doesn't fall for the old cliché that musicals have to make you happy. Instead of cheapening the movie version by lightening its load of despair, director Bob Fosse has gone right to the bleak heart of the material and stayed there well enough to win an. Liza Minnelli heads a strong cast. Taking its form from political cabaret, it's a satire of temptations. In a prodigious balancing act, Bob Fosse, the choreographer-director, keeps the period—Berlin, 1931—at a cool distance. We see the decadence as garish and sleazy; yet we also see the animal energy in it—everything seems to become sexualized. The movie does not exploit decadence; rather, it gives it its due. With Joel Grey as our devil-doll host—the master of ceremonies—and Liza Minnelli in her first singing role on the screen as exuberant, corruptible , chasing after the life of a headliner no matter what; Minnelli has such gaiety and electricity that she becomes a star before our eyes. Cabaret is drenched in the sexiest kind of cynicism and decadent despair. There was considerable sexual innuendo, profanity, casual sex talk homosexual and heterosexual , some evidence of anti-Semitism, and even an abortion in the film. The sequence was restored, however, when the film was shown on West German television on 7 November 1976. The point of the song was showing anti-Semitism as it begins to run rampant in Berlin, but there were a number of Jewish groups who interpreted the lyrics differently. Shortly before the , Fosse won two Tonys for directing and choreographing Pippin, his biggest stage hit to date. When, months later, he won the for choreographing and directing Minnelli's television special , he became the first director to win all three awards in one year. The film also won seven , including , and , as well as the for. It won the of the. Cabaret is cited on 's greatest films on TV and Video, and in magazine as one of the 100 Best Movies Ever. Liza Minnelli plays , an American adrift in pre-Nazi Berlin, in Bob Fosse's stylish, near-perfect film. Simple: Cabaret is the musical for people who hate them. Given the vibrancy of its now iconic numbers — Liza Minnelli in bowler and black suspenders astride a bentwood chair belting out 'Mein Herr' or shimmying and shivering with pleasure over 'Money' with Joel Grey — it sounds strange to say it, but one of the chief reasons why Cabaret is so popular is that it's not shot like a musical. It turned Liza Minnelli into a. Home video The film was first released to DVD in 1998. There have been subsequent releases in 2003, 2008, and 2012. The film's international ancillary distribution rights are owned by now part of , while which acquired the film as part of its purchase of , which had previously acquired the film library of has domestic distribution rights. In April 2012, Warner unveiled a new restoration of the film at the Classic Film Festival. A Blu-ray edition was released in February 2013. Before this, Cabaret had been sold on a DVD from Warner Bros. After automated digital repair attempts failed, the 1,000 feet of damaged film was hand painted using a computer stylus. Retrieved January 21, 2012. Retrieved 22 June 2016. Retrieved November 19, 2012. Retrieved March 25, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2013. Retrieved December 3, 2013. Retrieved 21 May 2018. Thus, the best Nazi song is by Jewish songwriters. A rabbinical person wrote to me saying he had absolute proof it was a Nazi song. Archived from on July 1, 2016. Retrieved September 15, 2011. Archived from on March 2, 2016. Retrieved February 21, 2016. TCM Classic Film Festival. Archived from the original on April 24, 2012. Archived from on February 8, 2013.
