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Product Details
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DVD Features:
Documentary:25th-Anniversary Documentary "Cabaret: A Legend in the Making"
Featurette:"The Recreation of An Era"
Interactive Menus
Interviews
Production Notes:"Kit Kat Klub Memory Gallery": The film's stars and creators reminisce about making movie musical history.
Scene Access
Theatrical Trailer
The film is based on "The Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood (written between 1935 and 1939), who lived in the city in the early 1930s. He had seen both the decadence and the dangerous hunger for a kind of national "purification" among many "respectable" and "moral" middle class Germans, who already had been traumatized by military defeat, hyperinflation, and mass unemployment. The film, following Isherwood, weaves together the stories of the marginal characters who live in this troubled city at the very edge of the great moral catastrophe of the 20th century.
Liza Minnelli is brilliant as "Sally Bowles", an Americanized version of the British Sally who appears in Isherwood's book, and her energy (and visible angst)drive the film as other characters wander aimlessly through a narrative heading all the time towards disaster. Michael York is effective as "Brian", the fictional stand-in for Isherwood himself, and the other characters present believable and even moving representations of people wandering through the impending nightmare as through a fog.
The nightmare itself is suggested by the increasing visibility of the Brownshirts and the sinister swastika, the authentic posters and grafitti from the period, and the passing visual allusion to the street fights and storm troopers. These allusions effectively evoke the sense of uneasiness and danger in the air, an effect reinforced by Sally's deep desire to scream her heart out.
... Read more ›Cabaret the movie doesn't share many songs in common with the original stage version - it still has "Willkommen," "Two Ladies," "Tomorrow Belongs To Me," a German version of "Married," "If You Could See Her," and "Cabaret" - but that's it. A few new songs were added - "Mein Herr," "Maybe This Time," "Money, Money," - but for the most part it's a lot less sung than the staged version. A lot of musical numbers dealing with the world outside the Kit Kat Klub were used as underscoring, preserving John Kander's great tunes. But this doesn't detract from it being one of the best filmed musicals out there.
Fosse's direction is a big help; it has a great eye for early 1930s Berlin, and presents the decadence and foreshadows the Nazis brilliantly. Fosse created great, sensual choreography for the film, and it is completely entrancing to watch the musical numbers. And the rest is worth it, too.
Flipflops aside, the couples are presented well; Liza Minelli's portrayal of Sally Bowles is definitely the acting part of a lifetime. She was just completely *convincing* as Sally, from end to end. Michael York as Brian is very reserved, very British, and very studied. Helmut Griem is entirely convincing as Max, who creates tension between the couple after befriending them.
... Read more ›They merely changed the packaging, I guess, so that they could mention "Chicago" in the description on the back cover and tie it into the heat for that film. Shame on you, Warner Bros. We all work hard for our money and deserve better than to believe we're buying a new anamorphic transfer, when you are really marketing the exact same discs as before.
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