From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I'd met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories.¹

—Christopher Isherwood, July 1954

Mr. Isherwood's painstaking efforts as a diarist were not wasted. His original concept was to turn his experiences into a “huge tightly constructed melodramatic novel.”² Instead, his memoirs reached print as a loosely interrelated series of short stories bolstered by incisive character portraits.

In 1935 the author published Mr. Norris Changes Trains (American title: The Last of Mr. Norris), an account of smuggling and espionage in Berlin, basing his depictions of Arthur Norris and others on real-life prototypes. Isherwood's journalistic flair, combined with his poet's eye, provided lasting portraits of Berlin just prior to the start of the Third Reich. One of the most memorable characters to emerge from the diary is Sally Bowles.

Isherwood's Sally is a young English would-be actress and demimondaine who sings (none too expertly) at The Lady Windermere, a Tauentzienstrasse cabaret. A social dropout with a kooky life-style and Bohemian amorality, she is very much a predecessor to Capote's Holly Golightly.

Isherwood's tribute to Sally first came out in 1937. Two years later, five thematically related short pieces—“A Berlin Diary: Autumn 1930,” “On Ruegen Island: Summer 1931,” “The Nowaks,” “The Landauers,” and “A Berlin Diary: Winter 1932-3”—were collected with Sally Bowles into a novella of sorts, entitled Goodbye to Berlin. (In turn, Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains were bound together in 1946 in a volume with the overall title The Berlin Stories—which is how they have been popularly known ever since.) The author's recollections of pre-Nazi Berlin document an era, just as they immortalize places and people—chiefly a seedy rooming-house, a girl, and a cabaret.

The stories of Goodbye to Berlin are told in first-person narrative by a budding novelist by the name of Christopher Isherwood, or as Fräulein Schroeder, his landlady, pronounces it, “Herr Issyvoo.” The proportion of autobiography to fiction can only be guessed at—but what is significant about Isherwood's work, beyond its evocation of period and mood, is the long life it has maintained in the media—first as a collection of reminiscences, then as a stage play called I Am a Camera, next as a film of the same title, then as the Tony award-winning musical Cabaret, and, most recently, as another motion picture. Sally Bowles and her compatriots have, in short, had more incarnations than almost any other figures of contemporary literature. A brief look at the source tells us why.

The story begins in the autumn of 1930 as young Isherwood comes to Berlin, assumedly to soak up atmosphere for a novel. Fräulein Schroeder's rooming-house strikes him as just the place for that. Bars, cafes, and theatres are nearby—and the boarding-house itself provides a feast for a youngster craving subjects for character study.

Schroeder is a gentlewoman who became impoverished during World War I and the resultant inflation. It was in these years that she began renting her rooms. In 1930, she hasn't even a room to herself, but sleeps in the parlor behind a screen. Her lodgers, not the genteel, educated roomers of yesteryear, include Fräulein Mayr, a Bavarian music hall jodlerin; Bobby, a barman; and Fräulein Kost, an aging streetwalker with an insatiable yearning for sailors (much to the chagrin of Fräulein Schroeder).

This, then, is the milieu Christopher Isherwood enters. Forever recording what he sees, he habituates the dens of Berlin low-life—following the street people (and, occasionally, his pupils, whom he tutors in English) to smoke-filled cabarets, on excursions to the beach, and to sidewalk cafes for late-hour conversation. Because some of his students are wealthy Jews, Christopher is privileged to observe the other extreme of Berlin society: he is invited to teas and dinner parties where he is welcomed as an intellectual and a gentleman—down-and-out though he may be. (One young lady studying English with Chris is Natalia Landauer, whose father owns one of the largest department stores in Berlin.)

Among Christopher's earliest acquaintances is Fritz Wendel, an appealing German youth who, to supplement his income, has succumbed to fortune-hunting. English lessons, he hopes, will make him more attractive to high society habituées.

While visiting Fritz's flat one afternoon, Christopher meets Sally Bowles. He is overwhelmed by her flippancy and her penchant for shocking chit-chat. She adds some sparkle to a rather drab day. From that time forward, Chris and Sally are good friends; most of their evenings are spent in The Lady Windermere in the company of Fritz, and, later, after Sally moves into Fräulein Schroeder's, across the hall from Christopher, in the company of Clive, a flagrantly affluent American who spoils his two new friends terribly. Inevitably, Sally falls in love with Clive (and his vague promises of launching her upon a career in the theatre), but no deeper in love than she is with dozens of other beaux.

Her constant hope, during all her indiscriminate flings—one of which results in an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion—is that one of her liaisons will lead to a contract with Ufa or a trip to Hollywood. (The cabarets, because of their international flavor, make excellent contact points—but Sally, in her naïveté, is always duped, as in the case of the sly young man who proclaims himself the European talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) Somehow, despite what is going on around her, Sally remains buoyant.

But Christopher's sojourn becomes less and less pleasant. Not only is his personal life unsatisfactory (his novel remains unwritten), but, by 1932, the brown shirts have made striking advances. Entries in Christopher's diary describe violent anti-Jewish demonstrations, the closing of the national banks, street beatings, raids on private dwellings, and the ousting of liberal publications:

The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been “kept in.” This morning, Göring has invented three fresh varieties of high treason.³

On the day before he leaves Berlin for England, Christopher writes this:

Today the sun is brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. I go out for my last morning walk, without an overcoat or hat. The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends—my pupils at the Workers' School, the men and women I met at the I.A.H.—are in prison, possibly dead. …

I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the tea-cosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very good photograph.

No. Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this has really happened. …⁴

The first person to adapt these Berlin stories for the stage was John van Druten. He called his dramatization I Am a Camera in honor of the opening of “A Berlin Diary,” in which the diarist writes:

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.⁵

I Am a Camera premièred in November of 1951, with the avowed objective of transferring the characters and mood of Isherwood's original onto the stage—in the playwright's words “the establishment for the audience of what it felt like to be living in Berlin in 1930, and the kind of life and people that one met there. …”⁶ As with all stage adaptations of literary works, van Druten's I Am a Camera is an example of dramatic compression—but an especially satisfactory example. The play derives largely from Sally Bowles in addition to other stories from the collection. Some new incidents are created by the dramatist, but in nearly every instance the creations grow from situations set up by Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin.

A case in point is the love affair of Fritz Wendel and Natalia Landauer, the department store heiress. In the original, these two never meet; in the recreation, Fritz begins, as in Goodbye to Berlin, as a friend of Sally's. As the play opens, he is concluding an English grammar lesson with Christopher when Natalia enters for her instruction. Fritz vows then and there to snare Natalia. However, as the story develops, he actually falls in love with her, after originally pursuing her for her money.

Throughout his life Fritz has successfully harbored a secret from even his closest allies: he is a Jew. But he finally overcomes his fears and admits the truth to Natalia (whose family, in any case, would never permit her to marry anyone but a Jew). She, in turn, dismisses earlier doubts that Fritz was a gigolo—and an Aryan gigolo at that. At the end of the play, they plan to be married. The emphasis on Fritz and Natalia is a wise one on van Druten's part because their love match establishes a nice contrast with the main story line: the platonic relationship of Christopher and Sally. As a departure from the original, then, it makes good sense.

But the Fritz-Natalia amplification is only one of the differences between Goodbye to Berlin and I Am a Camera. Here are others:

1. Clive (herein surnamed “Mortimer”) returns. Again he indulges Christopher and Sally with expensive gifts, then leaves without warning. But the distinction is that, on Broadway, Clive was played for laughs (by character actor Edward Andrews). As van Druten emphasizes, the character is,

technically, of great value to the play. He breaks up the more serious moments by each of his entrances. It is essential that he be played with the greatest vitality, poise, laughter—empty, pointless laughter—and with great sweep.⁷

2. Fräulein Schroeder inexplicably becomes “Fräulein Schneider,” and she remains that way throughout all the remaining versions of the Berlin stories. I say “inexplicably” although one might surmise that van Druten felt qualms about using the landlady's real name. (On the other hand, he received special permission from Isherwood to retain his—Isherwood's—name for the central character.)

3. The character of Fräulein Kost is eliminated. I Am a Camera is the only version from which she is absent.

4. An important secondary personage, Mrs. Watson-Courtneidge, appears in the van Druten script and not any other adaptation. Mrs. Watson-Courtneidge is Sally's mother. The dramatist invented her as a comedy character, one who completely misunderstands the relationship between Christopher and her daughter—whom she intends to take back to London with her. Like Clive Mortimer, Mrs. Watson-Courtneidge serves as comic relief.

Doubtless the most important change from Goodbye to Berlin is seen in Sally Bowles herself. The van Druten Sally is “softened.” She is, on the one hand, an immature little girl and on the other a self-knowing and humorous woman. But her frankness is always touched more by situation comedy mentality than by absolute revelation. The Sally that, in Goodbye to Berlin, tells Christopher

I feel as if I'd lost faith in men. I just haven't any use for them at all. … Even you, Christopher, if you were to go out into the street now and be run over by a taxi … I should be sorry in a way, of course, but I shouldn't really care a damn.⁸

is not the Sally of van Druten's play. The dramatist, in an obvious and understandable attempt to show the sentimental side of his character's nature, has her possess a teddy bear (perhaps not quite the cliché in 1951 it is today) and a painting called “The Kitten's Awakening.” (“I've had that ever since I was a child. It's a dead kitten waking up in Heaven—with angel kittens all around.”⁹

Julie Harris played Sally, and the unanimous raves she received matched her Member of the Wedding notices from the previous season. Decked out in black satin and wearing green fingernails (a holdover from Isherwood's description of Sally), Miss Harris won the hearts of audiences and critics alike. In some first-nighters' eyes, she outshone the play. (Still, the show took the Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best American play of the season.) But no one could have been more entranced with Julie Harris than Christopher Isherwood—who, even on the occasion of their first meeting, described the actress as “Sally Bowles in person. Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book, and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character.”¹⁰

Julie Harris repeated her stage role in the 1955 film version of I Am a Camera. The movie, shot in England, is essentially very faithful to its source and is worthy of note primarily (perhaps only) because it was denied a Production Code seal of approval. Sally was termed promiscuous and the film immoral—although in line with the more restrictive cinematic times, Sally's pregnancy is a false alarm and there is no abortion. By today's standards, I Am a Camera is out-and-out family fare.

The film delighted many critics, but among the dissenters was Bosley Crowther. His scathing indictment that the movie is “no more than a series of snapshots of an amoral and eccentric dame, flinging about … in the gloom of pre-Hitler Berlin”¹¹ may indicate that he completely missed the point. What Crowther decries as a “series of snapshots” is almost assuredly precisely the effect director Henry Cornelius was after—from the moment of Laurence Harvey's voice-over (the familiar “I am a camera, with its shutter open …”) to the final frame.

Among the new scenes which Cornelius and screenwriter John Collier devised especially for the picture are a cabaret sequence in which Sally sings, a visit to an expensive cafe, and a party which Clive throws. These bits can be looked upon, disparagingly if you wish, as “opening up” the stage play; but most critics felt the alterations damaged Isherwood and van Druten not in the least.

Christopher Isherwood once wrote—twenty years after the publication of Goodbye to Berlin—that he failed to recognize himself in those stories. If “Christopher Isherwood” seems alien to the author, one wonders what he would think of the Clifford Bradshaw figure in Cabaret. For Clifford is indeed the Isherwood surrogate, revitalized once again, this time for purposes of musical drama. A musicalized amalgam of Goodbye to Berlin and I Am a Camera, Cabaret has been termed “a scintillatingly unconventional musical … [that] makes the decadence of 1930 Berlin as memorable as Rome's.”¹² Abe Laufe, in his Broadway's Greatest Musicals, has said that

Living up to its title, the cabaret assumes a highly prominent position. It practically becomes a character. Certainly, its metaphorical properties are not to be overlooked. As conceived by librettist Joe Masteroff, the Kit Kat Klub (née The Lady Windermere) is a breeding ground for all the social ills of Thirties Berlin. All that is evil or debauched is on glittering, glaring display at the cabaret.

We already know about Sally's insouciance and her occasional heartlessness; yet the malevolent nature of her place of business is totally original with Cabaret. Even a second reading of Isherwood leaves one unprepared for the Kit Kat Klub. And it is a stroke of genius which moved Masteroff and Harold Prince, the stage director, to use the cabaret scenes as comments on the developments outside:

Several critics compared Cabaret to plays by Bertolt Brecht and the score to tunes written by Kurt Weill (who had been married to Lotte Lenya [the Fräulein Schneider of Cabaret]). According to Miss Lenya, who had lived in Berlin until 1933—when she and Weill escaped to Paris—Cabaret's atmosphere and plot, and many of the routines in the Kit Kat Klub, were authentic representations of life in 1930's Berlin.¹⁴

Cabaret, as musicals will, differs from its sources. A significant change in the evolution is the shifting relationship between Sally and Christopher (or Cliff as he is called in Cabaret, and Brian as he is named in the film based thereon). In I Am a Camera, the two have a more intimate association, albeit still platonic, than in Goodbye to Berlin. But Christopher is no longer the objective observer of the stories; he is a participant—despite the reiteration of his cameralike passivity.

In Cabaret, Christopher/Clifford “participates” more than ever: there is a further shift of emphasis to the principals' love affair, and it is Clifford who is responsible for Sally's pregnancy. (The movie expedites matters even more: not only do Brian and Sally live directly across the hall from one another, but she is the first person he talks to upon arriving in Berlin.) Sally's decision to undergo an abortion, coupled with his increasing distaste for Hitler, prompts the stage Clifford and the movie Brian to leave Berlin permanently.

It is interesting to chart what happens to other personages in the transition from novella to straight play and from straight play to musical book. Two heretofore important subsidiary characters, Fritz and Natalia, don't survive the transition into Cabaret at all. The musical stage adaptation is the single version in which they do not appear. (In Bob Fosse's film, Fritz and Natalia resume the relationship they had in I Am a Camera.) The secondary romantic plot belongs instead to Fräulein Schneider and the Jewish grocer, Herr Schultz. The musical play is the only time Herr Schultz comes to life (the role is eliminated from the motion picture); but in the original, Isherwood suggests the Schultz character with a reference to Fräulein Schroeder's much lamented friend who died of pneumonia.

The elder couple serve a function similar to the Fritz-Natalia pairing in the van Druten adaptation: in each case, the love matches demonstrate the conflict between heart and social consciousness. The oppressiveness of the Nazi party intrudes in both instances. Significantly, Fritz and Natalia's romance ends happily. Exemplifying Cabaret's more cynical approach, the wedding plans of the landlady and the grocer come to naught. The Nazi threat is too powerful, and the rift it causes between the oldsters is irreparable.

While Fritz and Natalia are integral to other versions of the Berlin stories, their absence from Cabaret is not to be quibbled over. The substitution of Schultz for Fritz and the beefing up of the Schroeder/Schneider role at the expense of Natalia are justifiable and purposeful. In no other variation of the stories, including Isherwood's, do we see so vividly how the Nazi uprising affects the old as well as the young. (There is one rather chilling exception: in the beer garden sequence of the movie, the camera lingers on the face of a puzzled old man as his countrymen—all younger than he—shoot to their feet in a rousing chorus of a Nazi anthem. The music swells, the old man glances surreptitiously at those standing around him—finding it difficult to believe or understand their fervor—and the effect is devastating.)

Another figure missing from Masteroff's script is Clive. Certainly the light-hearted man-about-town, as a major character at least, would be sorely out of place in terms of the librettist's concept. In Clive's stead is the sober figure of Ernst Ludwig—who bears his American millionaire predecessor one or two superficial similarities. Ernst introduces himself to Clifford as they are on a train en route to Berlin. Clifford watches as his traveling companion conceals a package from customs officials, a package he later says contains perfume and silk stockings from Paris. In time, Ernst tempts Cliff with several lucrative Paris-to-Berlin smuggling missions. When Sally becomes pregnant and will need money to support the baby, Cliff accepts one of the German's offers—later to discover that he is smuggling not perfume and lingerie but pro-Nazi documents. (Cliff had previously balked at Ernst's anti-Semitism, but he had remained naïvely unaware of his political leanings.)

While Fritz, Natalia, and Clive are ousted from the Masteroff edition, one Goodbye to Berlin character returns: Fräulein Kost. Still engaged in the world's oldest profession, she has a major supporting role in the musical. Her chief comic bits involve hiding her sailor customers from Fräulein Schneider. Not totally a despicable person, she nevertheless joins ranks with the Hitlerites and sings a reprise, with Ernst, of the marching song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” which brings Act One to an ominous conclusion. In the movie. Fräulein Kost's participation is diminished again—the camera catches her in several minor bits: at the card table with Fräulein Mayr; dancing with Fräulein Schneider; listening to the radio. Miniscule as the film role is, she makes an enduring impression. With her rouged cheeks, peroxide hair, and ancient face, she is not only an ominous presence, but a real horror.

But ominous presences and horror are what Cabaret is all about. If in performance it make its audiences feel slightly uncomfortable, then the show has achieved a measure of success. And the foremost symbol of horror in Cabaret, the most ominous presence of all is a quintessential element that makes the show unique—unique because nothing in the Berlin stories or I Am a Camera has quite prepared us for it. That element is the Master of Ceremonies. It is he who charges the show with energy and gives it shape. By his sinister attitudes and sleazy, show-bizzy know-how, he gives the play added meaning—not merely providing a framework for the other characters, but establishing the necessary camaraderie so the audience feels instantly transported to the Berlin cabaret, with all its false gaiety and cheap glamour.

The Master of Ceremonies, the role that made Joel Grey a star, is a brilliant addition. Like the Kit Kat Klub, and on a more realistic plane like Sally, he is a symbol of ugly and ruthless joie de vivre. He personifies the indifference of any nation, not just Germany, that can close its eyes and ears to persistent horrors and agonies. When such conditions continue, amorality turns to immorality—and one can sense the immorality in the Master of Ceremonies the instant he comes on stage. As his amorality converts to immorality, so does his joie de vivre turn to corruption. Joe Masteroff introduces his creation this way: “He is a bizarre little figure—much lipstick, much rouge, patent-leather hair parted in the middle. He walks toward the footlights and greets the audience.”¹⁵ He is more than a carny figure or a night club comic specializing in blue material. He represents a diseased society. The ironies of his song and dance routines underline this fact.

What lyricist Fred Ebb has done is to represent the Master of Ceremonies' routines (in fact, all the cabaret production numbers) as running commentary on life beyond the cabaret. The show contains fifteen songs, three reprises, and a finale. It can be said that each musical piece is intrinsic to the drama, although some are more fully integrated than others. As previously stated, the lyrics and book for Cabaret broke new ground with regards to content and theme. On that point, the Manhattan critics went overboard with praise; but the show, with a run of 1,166 performances, became a popular, as well as artistic, triumph.

What is equally important is that the John Kander music, too, reflects the tightly knit construction and the originality of the production as a whole. Abe Laufe has proposed that most of the songs mean little out of context, and he is perfectly right. Even the popular title song isn't a typical hit-parade item. And when it was performed by recording artists, emphasis was nearly always placed on the springly melody, with a concomitant sacrifice of the harshness and bitterness of the lyrics.

Cabaret's music is so well integrated with the book and the staging elements that it is almost impossible to discuss the Kander-Ebb contributions without first describing Boris Aronson's set—painted, appropriately enough, a tawdry scarlet and silver:

When the audience entered the theater, the curtain was up, revealing a bare stage except for a huge titled mirror which reflected the audience, in a sense making the theatergoer a part of the show. From this opening to the final scene, Boris Aronson's sets moved deftly on and off stage; during the intermission, the all-girl orchestra … played. The mobility of the sets and the use of stairs on either side of the stage for entre-scene movements gave the show fluidity.¹⁶

The first song of the evening—“Willkommen”—is delivered by the Master of Ceremonies as the suspended and distorted mirror ascends to the flies. In all his slimy slyness, the emcee greets the audience—in German, French, and English—and says that the purpose of the cabaret is to leave one's troubles outside. (“In here life is beautiful—the girls are beautiful—even the orchestra is beautiful!”¹⁷—on which cue the girl band appears, followed in quick succession by dancers, waiters, busboys, and other entertainers. All of them join in the “Willkommen.” At once, in this relatively brief but traditionally flashy opening, the style of the show is set.)

The scene, ending in blackout, is followed by a dialogue sequence—Cliff's “welcome to Berlin.” Essentially a study in exposition, besides establishing a few more characters, this scene is linked with the previous one by virtue of the arrival aspect: Cliff arrives in Berlin, just as we in the scene before “arrived” at the cabaret. At the outset, then, parallels are constructed. Thirties Berlin is placed in direct counterpoint to the Kit Kat Klub. Following this principle of juxtaposition, subsequent scenes alternate between life inside and outside the cabaret.

A particularly good example of this antiphonal effect exists in the concluding moments: two love affairs have broken up; the Nazis are fast gaining control of Germany; Sally has just had an abortion; and Jews are being taunted at every turn. Both the personal and public lives of the characters are changing. Not a single ray of hope is to be found—and yet Sally is able to announce, with equal amounts of false hope and actual conviction on her part, that “Life is a cabaret, old chum. …”¹⁸ In that moment is a true Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt.

As Sally sings her theme song, the all-girl orchestra joins in. The characters and sets from the first scene reappear (including, ultimately, the mirror which tilts down to its original position):

… but this time the picture and the mood are much different. The girls are not as pretty, German uniforms and swastika armbands are apparent; it is not as bright, a dream-like quality prevails: Dissonant strains of “Willkommen” are heard.¹⁹

In effect, the ultimate juxtaposition takes place—opening number (“Willkommen”) balanced against closing number (“Auf Wiedersehen”). And vive la différence!

Successful as this device is, it works to even greater advantage in the movie because immediate transitions and juxtapositions can be made by the film editor. David Bretherton, who cut Cabaret, enlivens the picture—making it as innovative in its own right as the stage musical was when it premièred. The musical sequences don't spring from the dialogue in the traditional, well-integrated sense. All the songs, with one perfectly logical exception, take place on the cabaret stage. (The best songs from the original production have been kept for the movie, and three new ones, also written by Kander and Ebb, introduced: “Mein Herr,” “Maybe This Time,” and “Money, Money.”) There is no singing or dancing to express one's emotions, at least in the sense that Fred Astaire used to convey his love for Ginger Rogers by tapping up and down the front stoop. In Cabaret, the songs and production numbers are used, not “naturalistically,” but always in strict counterpoint to the main plot developments. Of all the characters, only Sally is connected with both the straight drama and the cabaret songs. For these reasons, some people will argue that Cabaret is more a drama with music than a film musical, which might be true if the music were incidental. It is not. Every song, every dance sequence adds dimension to the story. Every musical arrangement enhances the mood and, moreover, every lyric clarifies the rather complex characters and character relationships.

The film begins in black and in silence. On the sound track, as the credits roll, we hear laughter and the clatter of glasses and dishes. Then, along with a slow fade-in, the orchestra tunes up. The credit sequence ends with a title: “Berlin: 1931.” The first image is the distorted mirror reflecting patrons of the Kit Kat Klub. A drum roll sounds, and the emcee's reflection, also distorted, appears; then, as the camera pans to his face, he begins the “Willkommen.” While he sings, we see flashes of the cabaret customers—disembodied, garish faces like the grotesques of Hieronymus Bosch.

The remainder of “Willkommen” is intercut with Brian's arrival at the railway station (and, subsequently, at Fräulein Schneider's). The effect, as on stage, is of connecting the arrival and welcome. (Departure and au revoir round out the piece.) And after a vision of the cabaret interior, and its habitués, we get dire implications of grotesquery. Is this, after all, what is in store for Brian? we ask. (Brian is very much an initiate; a wide-eyed naïf, he watches in fascination a cabaret mud-wrestling bout between two buxom fräulein, then is startled beyond belief when he finds himself sharing a urinal with Elke, the Kit Kat's resident female impersonator.) The association between the cabaret and what lies outside, simply through editing, is there to be pondered—and in the next scene, we are shown the crucial link between Brian and the cabaret (and corruption): Sally.

Sally's rendition from the Kit Kat stage of “Maybe This Time” is also intercut with a dramatic segment. A torch song, it immediately follows Sally and Brian's first night of lovemaking. The song is interspliced with a montage portraying their growing affection. The camera shows Sally warbling the verses to a virtually empty club. The tempo accelerates and, as Sally concludes that “maybe this time” she'll be lucky in love, we see the sparkle and hope in her eyes. Her outstretched arms catch the backlighting in such a way that rays seem to emanate from her fingers.

A similar dual-level observation is the interpolation of the Sally-Master of Ceremonies “Money, Money” duet. (“Money, Money” is an overhauling of “The Money Song” from the stage edition. The basic idea remains—“money makes the world go 'round”—but there is a better lyric.) As edited into the film, “Money, Money” becomes a direct comment on the wealth and waste of Maximilian von Heune, the young baron-substitute for Isherwood's American millionaire, Clive. Max is much like the Clive of I Am a Camera, except that the role is predominantly serious. He explains to Sally and Brian, “Mes enfants, you are, like me, adrift in Berlin. I think it is my duty to corrupt you. Agreed?” What is tossed off in jest becomes a reality. Max's money does indeed corrupt them. In fact, it is money which first attracts Sally to Max. The “Money, Money” duo—again performed au cabaret—is cut in directly after Sally sees the baron's chauffeured limousine for the first time. The sight inspires her avarice, and the cabaret number is a natural evolution, perfectly placed in the context of the drama.

Yet another cinematic linking device brings the cabaret and the outside world into juxtaposition: voice-overs. At the end, this technique of “bleeding” one scene into the next is used exquisitely. After Brian and Sally's farewell, the camera lingers on his face at the railway station (the first place we saw him), while we hear the Master of Ceremonies' introduction of Sally for “Cabaret.”

There are passing references in Goodbye to Berlin to homosexual liaisons, but Isherwood, for rather obvious reasons, isn't involved in them. In the movie Cabaret, however, the Isherwood figure becomes infatuated with the bisexual Max, who, as promised, “corrupts” both young people. In a moment of uncharacteristic temperament, Brian verbally flails Sally for her constant adulation of the baron: “Screw Maximilian!” he shouts. “I do” is her reply. And Brian, after a pause: “So do I.” The cabaret sequence which comments on this is the risqué ménage à trois ditty “Two Ladies.” The Master of Ceremonies asserts “Berlin makes strange bedfellows”; and, in light of the Brian-Sally-Max triangle, he is not at all wrong.

Other noteworthy musical contributions include “Mein Herr” and “Married.” The former is a more than satisfactory replacement for “Don't Tell Mama” in the stage show. Both songs share a kind of reeling tempo and a lyric of willful destructiveness; but “Mein Herr” seems the more appropriate of the two because it is a fine character revelation for Sally, as well as a foreshadow of the show's numerous abruptly terminated relationships. Donning vintage black hose, and backed by a chorus of frizzy and pudgy Kit Kat girls (à la The Blue Angel), Sally seduces the cabaret crowd with

You have to understand the way I am, Mein Herr …
You'll never turn the vinegar to wine, Mein Herr.
Bye, bye, mein lieber herr,
Farewell, mein lieber herr.
It was a fine affair but now it's over.
And though I used to care,
I need the open air.
You're better off without me, Mein Herr …
You mustn't knit your brow.
You should have known by now.
You had every cause to doubt me, Mein Herr.

With Herr Schultz's absence from the film and Fräulein Schneider's diminution in importance, some important musical changes take place. It is interesting to note what happens with “Married,” the Schneider-Schultz love ballad from the stage production. For the film's purpose, “Married” becomes a background instrumental with period orchestrations. (As audience members, we assume the music comes from a radio or Victrola.) Nicely incorporated into the movie, its soothing melody and words serve as a sharp and necessary contrast to the prevailing mood. “Married” is used in those two or three fleeting passages which approach the idyllic, including a picnic-on-the-grass sequence. All the rest is tawdriness and brassiness. At one point, during a scene in which Brian and Sally contemplate marriage, the number is vocalized in German (as “Heirat”) by Greta Walker.

The film version, while providing the unique cross-cutting and under-scene scoring possibilities, also allows for more ironies within the songs. One song sequence is rapidly becoming a cause célèbre because of the way editing plays such a dominant role. I am speaking of Bob Fosse's staging of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Significantly, it is the only musical number which does not occur in the cabaret—significantly, I say, because it shows outsiders, the commoners, the non-cabaret personages yielding to the ascending political powers. The sequence serves to remind that what goes on in the Kit Kat is not the single cause for horror.

Set in a sunny beer garden, the number relies for its success on a layer of ironies. The song's beautiful melody clashes with the implication of the words. (“The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs to me.”) At first, the scene appears pleasant enough: a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed youth begins singing in a lilting tenor voice. Then, slowly, the camera travels down from the boy's sunny Nordic face, tilting down past his shoulder—to the swastika armband on his sleeve. With each chorus, more and more people join in, rising to their feet as they do, while their fervor increases, their voices swelling to a crescendo. Finally, as the camera zooms away into the distance, and the refrain becomes softer and softer, there is a quick cut to the Master of Ceremonies smirking up, full-face, into the camera. Fosse once more takes an opportunity to link the Kit Kat Klub with the social situation. The legitimacy of his method is being hotly discussed in film circles: his critics say that the revelation of the boy's swastika is a cheap trick; his defenders call it a dramatically justifiable maneuver. Whatever the final verdict on Fosse's direction, it must be admitted that in the interim since his first film, the pathetic Sweet Charity, he has obviously learned something about the cinema. His night club/real life commentary in Cabaret is a startling technique.

While critics have argued the merits of the film cast—Michael York's Brian, Helmut Griem's Max, Fritz Wepper's Fritz, and the returning Joel Grey in the role he originated—Liza Minnelli has followed the Julie Harris tradition for carrying away glorious notices for her enactment of Sally Bowles. Minnelli's and Grey's affirmative press notices were seconded by the industry last March when the two of them became Academy Award recipients for their performances. (Cabaret was tapped for eight Oscars in all. Fosse, of course, was named best director of 1972.)

One of the most chilling moments involving Miss Minnelli comes just before the finale. Her rendition of the title song virtually pulls out all the stops. (Here “Cabaret” is employed more climactically than in the stage musical; sensibly placed after the lovers' parting, the song, with its mordant irony, has added impact.)

Sally comes onstage amid a flurry of lights. Assuming a defiant pose, she begins a eulogy of her friend Elsie who died in Chelsea of “too much pills and liquor.” Even so, Sally insists that “life is a cabaret.” Considering what the Kit Kat Klub represents, one realizes the rabid self-destructiveness which rules Sally. With a toss of her hair, she wails, “Life is a cabaret, old chum, / Only a cabaret, old chum, / And I love a cabaret!” You truly believe, after all is sung and done, that finally she will “go like Elsie.” (Minnelli's interpretation of the lyrics has a thunderbolt effect, and the camera—showing her eyes darting uncertainly and her arms outflung in the unmistakable Garlandesque manner—magnifies the intensity of both her, the singer and actress, and the really pitiable character she is portraying.)

Discussing the transfer of fiction into film, George Bluestone has said that there is

an inevitable abandonment of “novelistic” elements. This abandonment is so severe that, in a strict sense, the new creation has little resemblance to the original. With the abandonment of language as its sole and primary elements, the film necessarily leaves behind those characteristic contents of thought which only language can approximate.²⁰

Although this indictment may sound harsh, it does implicitly propound a fairly widespread notion that the cinematic tradition is first one of images and only secondarily one of ideas. Bluestone recognizes that a film's visual power frequently supersedes the literary value of a work. Although the scenario for Cabaret is a resplendent one (in fact, Jay Presson Allen, best known for her stage and screen versions of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, has constructed an extremely intelligent adaptation—in many ways more a return to the nature of Isherwood's original than were I Am a Camera or the Broadway Cabaret), it is hard to deny Bluestone's argument. What one remembers from this film are the visual elements:

• (1) the touching moment in which Fritz hides his frayed cuffs from Natalia;
• (2) Joel Grey's garish makeup and facial contortions;
• (3) the Nazi beating intercut with the Swiss hand-clapping dance at the cabaret;
• (4) the splattered body of a murder victim on the streets as Max's limousine passes;
• (5) the ugly spectacle of the Kit Kat Klub—ladies wrestling in mud; the laughing crowd; the telephones on the tables; and most of all,
• (6) the method by which the sweet-faced youth is revealed to be a Nazi brown shirt.

Here I'm reminded of the scene in Oh! What a Lovely War wherein the music hall songbird, flanked by recruiting posters, lures the young civilians onstage with “I Can Make a Man of Any One of You”—and when the youthful volunteers reach the stage to enlist, the camera moves in close to see what they see: the seemingly beautiful chanteuse is really a painted, cracked-face harridan. With the Nazi boy, we also have an illusion-reality schism, something the motion picture camera can record splendidly.

That same disturbing effect is repeated when Joel Grey leers at the camera during his bold assertions that “We have no troubles here. Here life is beautiful—the girls are beautiful—even the orchestra is beautiful.” The mutual ugliness of the cabaret and the emcee (and the orchestra) is primarily a matter of distancing, and on screen it can be made to seem even more grotesque than on stage.

These images, largely the responsibility of photographer Geoffrey Unsworth—and the lingering ones far exceed the six listed above—become the visual equivalents of Isherwood's writing. On screen, lifted from the pages of Goodbye to Berlin are the drifters, the whores, the cabaret artistes, the S.A. men, and the society children. As flickering images on pieces of celluloid, they stand in their own right as powerful reminders of the insouciance, the decay, and the forced joyousness—in the midst of joylessness—of pre-Hitler Berlin.

The Master of Ceremonies' finale salutes these Berliners. He reiterates an avoidance of reality which is practically the raison d'être of the cabaret (the “here life is beautiful” speech). In parting, the emcee sings “Auf Wiedersehen! À bientot!” Then, with a bow like a collapsed marionette, he flips through the curtain, leaving the song musically unresolved. Even the orchestra doesn't play the ultimate “Good night” chords—which it does in the stage show.) The sound track goes silent, leaving us in suspended animation, expectant, slightly off balance—caught unprepared when the emcee does not finish his song. After his disappearance, the camera pans back to the distorted mirror in which we see reflected the cabaret patrons—stark-faced, cheerless, unmoved, some of them wearing the familiar Nazi insignia.

Thus, with a bang and a whimper, begins the Third Reich.

Notes

1. Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin) (New York: New Directions, 1946), p. v.

2. The Berlin Stories, p. v.

3. The Berlin Stories, p. 203.

4. The Berlin Stories, p. 207.

5. The Berlin Stories, p. 1.

6. John van Druten, I Am a Camera (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1955), p. 5.

7. I Am a Camera, p. 8.

8. The Berlin Stories, p. 55.

9. I Am a Camera, p. 29.

10. The Berlin Stories, p. vii.

11. Bosley Crowther, “I Am a Camera,” The New York Times, August 9, 1955, p. 29.

12. Norman Nadel, “‘Cabaret’ Fine New Musical,” World Journal Tribune, November 21, 1966, p. 10.

13. Abe Laufe, Broadway's Greatest Musicals (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), p. 357.

14. Broadway's Greatest Musicals, p. 357.

15. Joe Masteroff, Cabaret (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 3.

16. Broadway's Greatest Musicals, p. 357. Interestingly enough, Boris Aronson—fifteen years earlier—had designed the one-room set of I Am a Camera.

17. Cabaret, pp. 3-4.

18. Cabaret, p. 114.

19. Cabaret, p. 113.

20. George Bluestone, Novels Into Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), p. vi.