Cabaret (1972)
 If
you're willing to accept that the musical truly came of age with
the arrival of Judy Garland at MGM, there's a fitting irony that
her daughter Liza Minnelli played the lead in this musical drama -
based on the 1955 film I Am A Camera which in turn was
based on the writings of Christopher Isherwood - set in the
decadent and increasingly dangerous Berlin of pre-WWII. Truly we
were not in Kansas anymore!
Brimming as it is with sex, drugs and racially motivated
violence to accompany the beguiling and frequently confronting
songs by Joe Masteroff, Cabaret meant the musical genre was never
going to be the same.
The nightmarish character of Joel Grey's Master Of Ceremonies
commenting on the main action from the sanctuary of Berlin's Kit
Kat Club was an ideal symbol for the seductions of Nazism and a
brilliant counterpoint to the naive writer played by Michael York.
At the film's centre however was Liza Minnelli who has never
truly escaped either her mother's legacy or the perfection of her
casting as ingénue Sally Bowles.
From this point in Minnelli looked naked without a bowler hat
and a wooden chair to place her foot on.
Cabaret won eight Academy Awards in 1972.
The famous Tomorrow Belongs To Me sequence with the slow
pull back to reveal the Hitler Youth was not originally devised by
director Bob Fosse, but tweaked in the editing room by editor,
David Bretherton.
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