geschnitten!

 

Gustav Wunderwald's paintings of Weimar Berlin

On the Guardian page today:

Cabaret review - Liza Minnelli musical still divinely decadent and chillingly relevant

Minnelli brings the razzle dazzle to a Berlin determined to ignore the gathering storm in this cinematic masterpiece

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...Peter Bradshaw writes,

        ------------------- The film's view of fascism is still very relevant:  extremism and racism are enabled by cynicism, irony and exhaustion.  This time around, I couldn't watch Joel Grey's death's-head grin as the MC presiding over the raucous Kit Kat Club without thinking of smirking Elon Musk in charge of the unending Twitter quarrelfest. ...

        ...All of Minnelli's songs are wonderful; it's interesting to watch her final number, the hymn to the cabaret itself, in which the cramped stage seems suddenly to quadruple in size and looks more like Vegas or London's Talk of the Town:  it's a very Judy Garland moment.

        Cabaret is still an amazing experience, a world fiddling while Rome prepares to burn:  gloomily sexy, elegant, with an overwhelming sense of evil.

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reader comments:

~~ The 'tomorrow belongs to me' scene is one of the most iconic in movie history.  Absolutely chilling warning of the horrors to come.

~~ I saw Cabaret when I was 18 in a German cinema in Berlin, with German subtitles.  This was way before the wall came down.  I was riveted by all the performances, and the prewar atmosphere.  I have always loved it, and Liza Minnelli's depiction of Sally Bowles.

~~ I saw it in Germany too, and the entire "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" beer garden scene was edited out.  To their credit, the audience was aware of the cut, and there were angry shouts of "geschnitten!"

~~ ...I would agree with the other posters here that it is amongst the best film musicals, and amongst the best fictional studies of the descent into tyranny.  Let's hope we are not currently supplying future authors with material on that score.

~~ I'm not a great fan of musicals, but this is one of the exceptions - a brilliant piece, all too convincingly portraying how the Nazi rise came about - or was allowed to happen.  Minnelli and Grey are superb; the 'Tomorrow belongs to me' scene is truly chilling.

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        The reason they were showing Cabaret in England was to mark 50 years since it first came out.

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