Cabaret (movie)

Cabaret is a 1972 film. It was directed by Bob Fosse and it stars Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey. The film is set in Berlin in the run-up to the coming to power of the Nazis under Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s.

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

It is based on the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret, which was in turn based in part on the stories of Christopher Isherwood.

Story line

Sally Bowles, is an American singer at the Kit kat night club in early 1930s Berlin. She rents a room to Brian, a reserved English academic and writer. Brain gives English lessons to earn a living while completing his German studies. She unsuccessfully tries to seduce him and concludes he is gay. They become friends and Brian is witness to Sally's anarchic bohemian life in the last days of the German Weimar Republic. The violence of the Nazis' rise to power is repeatedly present but always only glimpsed in moments throughout the film. The songs are nearly all performances at the Kit Kat club and tend to have an overt sexual content. Brian and Sally eventually become lovers and Brian concludes that his previous failures with women are because they were the wrong ones. A rich playboy, Max, befriends and seduces them both but then abandons them, leaving Sally pregnant but unsure who the father is. Brian offers to marry her and take her back to his university life in Cambridge. Sally realises she could never lead such a quiet academic life and goes ahead with a planned abortion. The film ends with Brian departing for England by train and Sally continuing her life in Berlin. The club's master of ceremonies is only seen in his stage persona, but provides repeated knowing looks to that camera that the party is about to end. A sub plot concerns a Jewish man who had been passing as Christian who falls for and marries a wealthy Jewish heiress. We are left wondering what their fate will be. The film is largely made in low light and has a film noir feel, although made in colour.

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