By Zach Kolkin

April 10, 2003

With all the hype and hoopla surrounding Chicago this awards season, many are proclaiming the rebirth of the musical. Until this year, a musical had not been a major player on Oscar night in exactly thirty years, Cabaret won a whopping eight awards, and was nominated for two more, both times losing to The Godfather. It is surprising to me that more has not been made of the strong ties between the two films. Bob Fosse, the director of Cabaret, also wrote the original musical version of Chicago, and the songs for both films were done by the famous team of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Stylistically, the films share many similarities as well, particularly in the interplay between the musical numbers and the surrounding storyline. It was only after re-watching Cabaret recently that I began to notice these correlations, but it soon became clear to me that there was more than a passing resemblance. The social commentary present in Chicago, dealing with America's obsession with sensationalism, has been quite well documented, and thus I was much more interested in exploring the similarly intelligent commentary found in Cabaret.

There are a good number of differences between the original Broadway musical version of Cabaret and its motion picture counterpart. Nevertheless, the basic story remains the same, centering on a cabaret in Berlin and detailing the effects of the rise of the Nazi party. The names, ages, nationalities, and religious backgrounds of the major characters flip-flop in each version of Cabaret - here, the main characters are Sally, an American cabaret performer, Brian, a bisexual professor from England, and Maximilian, a German playboy - but the themes remain quite similar. The film is quite provocative in how it deals with these themes, particularly those of decadence and Jewishness. The film argues a strong correlation between the decadence of the people of Germany at the time, as seen in the cabaret, and the rise of the Nazi party. Furthermore, the link between the decadence of the cabaret and the Jewish entertainer is strengthened in the character of the master of ceremonies, portrayed spectacularly in the film by Joel Grey.

During one of the first musical numbers in the movie, we see a single Nazi soldier enter the club, only to be physically harassed and kicked out of the cabaret by the owner. By the end of the film, though, the cabaret owner has been beaten to death by the Nazis, and the club's entire audience is dominated by Nazi soldiers, proudly wearing their swastika armbands. What has caused this transformation? Part of it, the film argues, is apathy - as Maximilian tells Brian early on in the movie when he asks how Germany can let the Nazis continue to survive, the German attitude was that the Nazi party could be easily dispensed with as soon as the Nazis had finished killing off all the Communists. It is this attitude - to ignore what is happening around you as long as it doesn't directly affect your daily routine, and instead indulge in the fantasy that "life is a cabaret" - that gives the Nazis the opportunity they need to prosper. By the time anyone realizes just how far the whole thing has progressed, a young teenage member of the Nazi army is hailing Hitler and singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", and the whole audience is joining in.

It is only then that Brian realizes that while he has been off indulging in champagne, sex, and golden cigarette holders with Sally and Max that the Nazis have become dominant. Is this decadence, so savagely mocked in the cabaret by acts such as "Two Women" or the mud wrestling match, simply a distraction that allows the Nazis to gain power, or is there a more direct link between the two? The film is understandably somewhat ambiguous on this point, as it is quite dangerous and provocative to suggest that the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of the decadence exhibited in the cabaret. This danger arises from the close ties the film also draws between this outrageous decadence and the film's Jewish figures.

The most important Jewish character in Cabaret is one whose Jewishness is never explicitly stated. This character, of course, is the master of ceremonies. The emcee's heavy makeup and cross-dressing is perhaps the most compelling clue in recognizing his Jewishness. All the pancaked makeup gives the emcee a "clownface" that recalls the practice of blackface, extremely popular among entertainers in the early 20th century, particularly those who were Jewish. The cross-dressing and feminine mannerisms of the master of ceremonies give him a grotesque sexual appearance, another tradition with an extremely long history among Jewish male entertainers. Other smaller clues (the last line of the song "If You Could See Her", or his performance of the song "Money", for example) give further evidence that the master of ceremonies is indeed a Jewish man.

If the rise of the Nazis is indeed a direct result of the cabaret's decadence, the fact that the cabaret's emcee is Jewish presents quite a problem. After all, if one is to place a face on the decadence of the cabaret, it would certainly be that of the master of ceremonies. If the Nazi's rise is to be considered the fault of the cabaret, it is also by extension the fault of the emcee. If this emcee is Jewish, the next logical step would be to say that the Nazi's ascension was the result of Jewish decadence. Regardless of whether there is any truth to the statement (and certainly one would be hard pressed to find someone who would argue this point) it is an extremely dangerous position to take, and smartly the film does not go so far as to explicitly suggest it. Instead, Cabaret contents itself by depicting a tragically opulent decadence that distracts the people of the Weimar Republic from noticing the real problem at hand - that of the Nazis.

Perhaps the real genius of Cabaret is not that it manages to deal with such provocative subjects so well, but that it manages to do it in the frame of the movie musical. For many, Cabaret is simply a fun musical with a bunch of great songs whose words you know by heart. This is certainly a perfectly legitimate view of the film. However, there is much more to this film beneath the surface, particularly in the form of social commentary, a subject for which the musical might not seem the best medium. Nevertheless, Cabaret provides an extremely intelligent perspective on the rise of the Nazis, and it fits its commentary perfectly within its musical framework. Cabaret created an enduring formula for success that, in addition to leading to the film's own accolades, provided the framework for the immense popularity and success of Chicago.