Another old movie review no one asked for

So, I finally got around to watching Cabaret on DVD last night.  I was 12 when it came out so it held no particular interest at the time. But of course Liza Minelli kept singing the title song for the next 20 years and then Andrew Bolt started misusing Tomorrow Belongs to Me to bolster his alleged martyrdom, so I had a fair idea of what it was about.

But I have to say I was seriously underwhelmed. 

On the upside, Liza was pretty good as a ditzy, likeable and dislikable in equal parts, character.  You can tell it was a genuine star turn.

But as for the downside: gee, it's an intensely early 70's kind of movie, isn't it?  The period seemed unduly interested in "bad/promiscuous girl/prostitute with a kind heart" stories, if you ask me, as well as ones about open relationships/threesomes (all a part of coming to grips with the sexual revolution I guess) and this story falls into that category.  But it feels thematically very dated now.

Apart from the mystery of whoever told Michael York he could act, the main problem is that I was expecting more drama in the story.  I thought that maybe someone would die or disappear at the hands of the early Nazis; that York would turn out to be a spy; or there would some sort of redemption or improvement of Liza's character.  But no.  There's also a side story of two Jewish characters that has little in the way of drama and doesn't seem to serve much point.

I also wonder about whether the movie overdoes the somewhat grotesque appearance of cabaret of the era.  I mean, the female performers apart from Liza all looked too old, too plump, and with such garish make up that  it made it hard to understand the sex appeal of the shows, even to an older male audience.

I am sure there must be heaps of photography books devoted to the topic, so I will go looking and report back one day.  I don't expect it looked like the quasi techno rave re-imagining that Babylon Berlin gave nightclubs of the time, but I wonder if the movie goes too far the other way and makes it look too dingey.

Anyway, can cross that one off the list of famous movies I feel I should have seen by now.  Wish it had been better.