#63 ‘Cabaret’
Glitter, Gaslight, and the Fall of the Weimar Dream
Cabaret (1972) is a sequined dirge, a decadent last gasp of liberal denial as fascism creeps in through the stage door. Bob Fosse directs this jazz-soaked apocalypse with a cigarette in one hand and a raised eyebrow in the other, never letting you forget that while the music plays, the world outside is quietly going to hell. It’s dazzling, yes—but it’s also devastating, especially if you’re a woman, a queer person, or just someone who thought Berlin might be fun before the brownshirts showed up.
Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles is a chaotic masterpiece: charming, reckless, heartbreaking. She sings, she flirts, she spirals—always on the verge of greatness or ruin. She’s a woman who lives like the future doesn’t exist, because deep down, she knows it probably doesn’t. Her cabaret performances aren’t just musical numbers—they’re acts of defiance, breakdowns with choreography. And yet, she’s never allowed to be right. She’s punished for her freedom, her ambition, her refusal to become palatable. The more she insists on her own story, the more the film insists on making her a tragic footnote in someone else’s.
That someone else is Brian (Michael York), an English academic who claims to be sexually inexperienced, then slides into bisexuality like he’s taste-testing rebellion. His relationship with Sally is tender, confusing, and deeply unequal. She’s vibrant chaos; he’s repressed analysis. She wants to live; he wants to study it. And when things get messy—emotionally, politically—he gets to leave. Because of course he does.
The real magic (and menace) of Cabaret is Joel Grey’s Emcee: a painted goblin of glee and menace who grins through every number like he knows exactly how this ends. He doesn’t exist in the “real world,” but his shadow stretches across it. Every time we cut to the Kit Kat Club, we’re reminded that entertainment doesn’t distract from politics—it reflects it, feeds on it, seduces you into complicity with it.
Fosse’s direction is tight and cynical, stripping away sentimentality and exposing the bones underneath. The musical numbers are barbed wire in a feather boa: “Money” is a capitalist nightmare in duet form; “If You Could See Her” is a joke with a punchline that lands like a Nazi boot. And “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”? That one stops the movie cold—because the future does belong to someone, and it’s not the people singing jazz in a dive bar.
Yes, the film is iconic. Yes, Liza is electrifying. But don’t mistake glamour for comfort. Cabaret isn’t a celebration. It’s a warning. The party doesn’t last. The queers get crushed. The women get discarded. And the men? They board trains, leave love behind, and tell themselves they were never really part of it anyway.
4.5 out of 5 monocles shattered on the dance floor
(One for Minnelli. One for Grey’s grinning nihilism. One for Fosse’s razor-sharp choreography. One for the film’s refusal to blink. The half star? For daring to sing as the world burns. The missing half? Left behind with Sally, who was too much, too bright, and never quite enough—for a world that was already building the camps before the curtain fell.)
