'Cabaret' is a dazzling combination of music, drama, and social commentary...<br /><br />'Cabaret' is more than a musical... It is tough, satirical, acrid, and provoking... None of the sweetness of Rodgers and Hammerstein, none of the joyous celebration of life of 'The Sound of Music.'<br /><br />'Cabaret' is an exciting place for music...<br /><br />'Cabaret' is the first musical to exploit the notion that life is fascinating because it is ambiguous... <br /><br />'Cabaret' uses music in an exciting new way... His characters do not disintegrate into song to express their emotions... Rather, a sleazy night club becomes a place where satirical comment on the lives and problems of these characters is made in striking, entertaining, and often in ferocious dances and songs...<br /><br />'Cabaret' is only one of three major elements that remains separate in the film and then gradually and inexorably become melted into one... These elements are the music of the cabaret, the lives of the principal characters, and the world outside of their narrow domain... <br /><br />Director Bob Fosse captures the atmosphere and turmoil of the time and place, just before Hitler's rise to power, presenting a multifaceted portrait of a hedonistic, increasingly dangerous society, in which every brushstroke is significant and influential...<br /><br />The cast, headed by Liza Minnelli as an American cabaret star and Michael York as the shy Englishman suffering with the fact that he "doesn't like girls," perfectly embodied the characters caught up in the currents of the tale...<br /><br />The film begins with an amorphous view of Berlin's Kit Kat Club in 1930s Germany, and as the view becomes clearer, we meet the nightclub's depraved customers and its host, the charming painted emcee, who sings 'Willkommen' as the cabaret's girls play their musical instruments... At this moment, the Kit Kat Club shows a world unconcerned with events... Sally is a citizen of this world, deliberately shocking, cheerfully promiscuous, a lost child masquerading as a seductive woman...<br /><br />Away from the nightclub, Sally plays the leading role in a fantasy of her own imagination... Speaking almost entirely in emotional hyperbole, she regards herself as 'a strange and extraordinary person'... She takes Brian under her wing and one day introduces him to Helmut Griem, a rich, suave, divinely sexy baron with whom they both have affairs... <br /><br />Everyone becomes part of her free world: an unseen father who is indifferent to her; and Marisa Berenson, a young serious Jewish department-store heiress who is feverishly courted by an opportunistic, a fortune hunter, called Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper)..<br /><br />At first Sally's insulated life bears little relation to the events propelling Germany toward its bleak destiny... Gradually, however, the cabaret becomes more threatening; the Master of Ceremonies provides the historical and social themes throughout his songs.. (he and Sally sing 'Money makes the world go 'round').. Later he sings a stimulating 'Two Ladies' about the joys of a ménage à trois.. He even dances with a girl in a gorilla costume, singing 'If You Could See Her' adding in a confidential whisper, 'If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn't look Jewish at all!"<br /><br />Only once does the film leave the nightclub for a musical number in an outdoor café, and then it is for one of the film's most haunting scenes, where a young boy begins to sing 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me'.. While Fosse's camera pans down to reveal his sinister insignia... started to sing along with patriotic passion... It is a sequence of frightening beauty, made even more memorable by several quick shots of an elderly man, silently sitting on a table.. disapproving the song...<br /><br />When the pathetic Master of Ceremonies tells us once again that 'life is beautiful' and the Kit Kat Girls break into a reprise of 'Willkommen,' the irony is devastating... The final shot of the growing of Nazis in the audience reinforces the menace of the political horrors, and turns the cabaret into a daring place of diverting escapism...<br /><br />As Sally, Liza Minnelli is entirely a creature of cabaret... She sings the title song in a number of stunning effectiveness... The song sums up the film's sardonic view... Minnelli is required to go from a girl of easy virtue proclaiming that 'certain cigarettes make her go wildly sensual' to a helpless person sobbing 'Maybe I am.. just nothing!' --- but she manages to control the connections of mood with style and sensitivity... In one song, 'Maybe This Time', she is too close to her mother Judy Garland.. as the two possess a similar intensity, warm vibrato, the blend of pathos and humor, and an over-eagerness to communicate with their audiences... <br /><br />'Cabaret' is not unforgettable... It is great entertainment, a daring piece of diverting escapism that hopefully will revitalize a tired form...