Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)

I've been reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which a young German engineer, recuperating in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, decides to read up on physiology. He concludes that life itself is a kind of disease, "a fever of matter." In Cabaret, Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) proclaims that "life is a cabaret, old chum." Yet given that the cabaret presided over by the Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey) in the film is a febrile sort of place, there's a coherence between the two views. Director Bob Fosse would himself go on to posit a relationship between illness and creativity in All That Jazz (1979). And Sally Bowles's favorite phrase, the seeming oxymoron "divine decadence," suggests that out of decay comes something higher. What would be the opposite, after all: satanic order? In perhaps the movie's most chilling moment, Fosse gives us a closeup of a cherubic, well-scrubbed young face, the very opposite of the Master of Ceremonies's rouged and lipsticked face that  has dominated the film from the very beginning. The boy then begins to sing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," and as the camera pulls back we see that he is wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. As the crowd at the open-air beer garden, which has to this point seemed an idyllic setting, joins in and begins to raise their arms in the Nazi salute, we view the very definition of satanic order. But enough German dialectics here; just let me say that Cabaret is one of my favorite movie musicals. As I have said before in this blog, I prefer musicals created originally for the movies, like the Warner Bros. films with the kaleidoscopic routines of Busby Berkeley, the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, or the sublime Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952), and not the musicals like West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961) or My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), that were translated to film from the stage. My admiration for Cabaret would seem to be an exception to that rule, except that when Fosse became director, he jettisoned the book that had been written by Joe Masteroff for the 1966 Broadway musical and went back to the source, Christopher Isherwood's 1939 The Berlin Stories. Jay Presson Allen had been commissioned to write the screenplay, but Hugh Wheeler (credited as "research consultant") heavily revised what she had written. Fosse also dropped many of the songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb, though he added new ones by them: "Money, Money" and "Mein Herr," along with one of their older songs not from the Broadway version, "Maybe This Time." And he made the significant decision to keep the musical numbers confined to the Kit Kat Klub stage -- a touch of cinematic realism that seems essential to a story set in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. The result is a musical essentially created (or at least re-created) for the movies. It received 10 Oscar nominations and won eight of them, including awards for Minnelli, Grey, and Fosse, as well as for Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography. The only categories in which it lost were best picture and best adapted screenplay, which went to The Godfather and its screenwriters, Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Dave Bowman: Keir Dullea
Frank Poole: Gary Lockwood
HAL 9000: Douglas Rain (voice)

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke
Based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke
Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth
Production design: Ernest Archer, Harry Lange, Anthony Masters

I know that I first saw 2001 on April 13, 1968, because that (as a little Googling tells me) was the date of the lunar eclipse I witnessed on leaving the theater in Boston, an appropriately cosmic climax to the cinematic experience I had just had. Kubrick's film was an experience to be savored by those of us who were already hip to the revolution in American filmmaking underway after the sensation of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967). I doubt that anyone who wasn't of an age to experience it realizes quite how revolutionary those movies seemed to us. Though it's conventional to say that our experiences were produced in part by controlled substances, anyone who really knows me knows that I wasn't under the influence of any substance stronger than beer. Today, 2001 doesn't seem much like a revolutionary film: We have lived through the actual 2001, which had its own epoch-making event in the September of that year, but in which no one was making trips to the moon on Pan Am. That airline went out of business in 1991, and the last real moon expedition, Apollo 17, took place in December 1972. But the future is never quite what it's cracked up to be. What was revolutionary about 2001 the movie is that it taught us how a movie can make us think without spelling out its ideas for us. Kubrick wisely whittled down the narrative given him by Arthur C. Clarke to a series of images, and ditched the score written by Alex North for an evocative set of snippets from classical works, letting us assemble any meaning to be derived from the film for ourselves. Of course, in 1968 we went back to our apartments and dorm rooms and did just that. Seeing it today, I am most struck by how skillful Kubrick was in creating the persona of HAL, the sentient computer. Much credit goes, of course, to the voiceover work of Douglas Rain, but also to Kubrick's choice to make the dialogue of the humans in the movie as banal and jargon-filled as possible. HAL's final pleading and breakdown as Dave pulls his memory chips is haunting. Yes, the movie has its longueurs: Kubrick is deservedly proud of its landmark special effects and spends more time than is necessary showing them off. They won him the film's only Oscar, without honoring the work of Douglas Trumbull and others who executed them. He was also nominated as director and as co-screenwriter with Clarke, and the art direction team received a nod, but the film was passed over for the significant work of cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, who was assisted by John Alcott, and for the sound crew headed by Winston Ryder. And it failed to receive a best picture nomination in the year when that award went to Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968). I happen to like Oliver! and don't think it's necessarily one of the Academy's more shameful choices, but it's certainly not an epochal movie.