Welcome to Queerty’s latest entry in our series, Queerantined: Daily Dose. Every weekday as long as the COVID-19 pandemic has us under quarantine, we’ll release a suggested bit of gloriously queer entertainment designed to keep you from getting stir crazy in the house. Each weekend, we will also suggest a binge-able title to keep you extra engaged.
The Essential: Cabaret
Film historians often cite a single film as the turning point where old-style bust-out song & dance Hollywood musicals finally became passe: Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. Released in 1972, and based on the Kander & Ebb Broadway hit, the film integrates songs organically into the plot; we’re as much watching a character perform as we are a full-on production number. The most successful contemporary musicals–Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hedwig and the Angry Inch–often use a similar gimmick to win over an audience or to avoid seeming too much like a music video.
Even without its style innovations, Cabaret stands as a monumental achievement in film. Plot-wise, the movie abandons most of the stage plot, more directly adapting gay author Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which inspired the theatrical version. The story follows Brian (Michael York), a bisexual writer living in the final days of pre-Nazi Berlin. There he meets a would-be actress who performs in a seedy nightclub, Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli). With her party-hard lifestyle, irreverent attitude and undeniable bravura, she fascinates Brian, and the two become best friends and lovers. As Berlin becomes more and more violent with antisemitism and homophobia, Sally and Brian begin a three-way affair with Max, a wealthy benefactor. With the Nazi rise becoming undeniable, Brian and Sally must decide how to spend their futures: mundane married life in England, or continuing the party in Berlin as the world falls down around them.
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Minnelli gave one of the best performances in the history of the movies in Cabaret, and won a well-deserved Oscar for her work. Ditto Joel Grey as the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, and director Fosse. The music of Kander & Ebb produces one smash number after another, with tunes like “Maybe this Time,” “Mein Herr,” and “Cabaret” electrifying the screen, and the film’s treatment of Nazism rising out of banal daily life should terrify viewers. Musicals rarely ignite the screen like this…or get this scary.
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Jared MacBride
Possibly the best movie musical ever made; certainly in the conversation. The scene at the picnic where the boy from the Hitler youth sings Tomorrow Belongs To Me is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen on film.
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Cam
Absolutely true.
Funny side-note. I loved it when some American white supremacist Trump supporters tried to use the song at one of their rallies only to have social media mock them because the song wasn’t an old traditional German folk song, but was written for a Liza Minnelli movie by a gay, Jewish songwriter. lol
Joshooeerr
Sorry to be pedantic, but Tomorrow Belongs To Me was not actually “written for a Liza Minnelli movie”. It was written for the original broadway show, which did not star Liza. And it was written by TWO gay jews – John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb (lyrics).
o.codone
Cam randomly talks out of his azz, so you have to be careful about what he says. In this case, he’s talkin BS.
jackmister
Cam, that’s funny as hell!
Low Country Boy
Agreed.
Mister P
I think Joel Grey’s performance is one of the best performances ever.
gaym50ish
The first time I saw the movie, I missed a key line. When Brian says, “F_ck Max,” Sally replies, “I do.” After a brief chuckle, Brian says, “So do I.” I was in an open-air theater with a less-than-perfect sound system that first time, and I didn’t get it. I have watched the movie a hundred times since then and always get a laugh out of that line.