Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the musical drama "Cabaret," directed by Bob Fosse and released in 1972.

"Cabaret" stars Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Marisa Berenson, Fritz Wepper, and Joel Grey.

The film is a reworking of the long-running 1966 Broadway musical of the same name, and ultimately takes its story from Christopher Isherwood's novella, "Goodbye to Berlin," published in 1945.

The novella also inspired both a play and a film titled "I Am a Camera," based on a line from the book's first page, "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

"Cabaret" takes place in Berlin in 1931 during the last days of Weimar Republic.

A young British academic, Brian Roberts, arrives in the city where he hopes to support himself by giving English lessons.

He moves into a boarding house where he meets another lodger, Sally Bowles, a young American woman who performs at the Kit Kat Klub, a seedy, second-rate cabaret.

Sally attempts to seduce Brian, but he confesses he has never had a successful relationship with a woman.

They become friends, and Brian is drawn into Sally's world of divine decadence.

One of Brian's pupils, a would-be gigalo named Fritz, aspires to marry a wealthy woman, no matter how unattractive, but instead falls for a beautiful Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer.

After Sally is stood up for a dinner date by her diplomat father, Brian consoles her and they begin a sexual affair.

They are both pursued by a wealthy aristocrat, Maximilian von Heune, who plies them with gifts and expensive outings.

Interspersed throughout are satirical songs performed at the Kit Kat Klub, offering commentary on the action and changing mores.

But there are also recurring indications throughout the story, first subtle and then increasingly stark, that alongside the festivities, the Nazi Party and Adolph Hitler are relentlessly rising to political power.

The Weimar Republic was established in Germany on November 9th, 1918, two days before the armistice ending the First World War.

Germany was exhausted and humiliated after the war and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Weimar endured five years of hyperinflation, political violence, and tense relationships with the victorious Allied nations.

There was a great deal of resentment in Germany over the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles and Allied demands for war reparations.

The German mark was completely devalued.

During the worst period of hyperinflation, workers would rush out to spend all their wages at clubs and bars each evening before their money lost its value overnight.

At the same time, Germany during the Weimar Republic was experiencing a cultural renaissance in literature, theater, film, graphic art, and architecture.

Jazz bands and cabarets became popular forms of entertainment and young German women adopted the fashions and behavior of American flappers, wearing their hair short and their dresses short, smoking, and otherwise offering a challenge to traditional morality.

It was a time of cultural ferment and experimentation of all sorts.

Conservatives and traditionalists were upset by what they saw as the degradation of German culture, by the adoption of foreign fashions and tastes, especially those promoted by American motion pictures.

Artists and performers were charged with obscenity, defamation of the military, and blasphemy.

But much of the rest of the Western world looked to Germany and especially Berlin as the cutting edge of a new European avant-garde.

From 1924 to 1929, the Weimar Republic maintained relative monetary and political stability during a period that came to be known as the Golden Twenties.

But the beginning of the Great Global Depression in October 1929 hit Germany especially hard.

High unemployment and widespread poverty and hunger in the early '30s undermined Weimar's Coalition government.

Using emergency powers granted by President Paul von Hindenburg, a series of chancellors attempted to restore Germany's fortunes.

Hindenburg appointed Adolph Hitler chancellor on January 30th, 1933.

Within two months, Hitler manipulated political events to bring an end to the Weimar Republic and create a single-party dictatorship under his own absolute authority.

"Cabaret" was both a popular and a critical success when it was released February 13th, 1972.

Pauline Kael, writing in "The New Yorker," called it "a great movie musical.

Taking its form from political cabaret, it's a satire of temptations.

In a prodigious balancing act, Bob Fosse, the choreographer-director, keeps the period, Berlin, 1931, at a cool distance.

We see the decadence as garish and sleazy, yet we also see the animal energy in it.

Everything seems to become sexualized.

The movie does not exploit decadence.

Rather, it gives it its due."

The film was a box office success, earning about $8 million worldwide by May 1973.

"Cabaret" won a host of movie awards in the United States and Europe.

It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won eight, including Oscars for Bob Fosse, Liza Minnelli, and Joel Grey.

It still holds the record for the most Oscars won by a film that didn't also win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

That honor went instead to "The Godfather."

"Cabaret" was initially given an X rating, indicating it was to be seen by adults only, because of it's sexual innuendo, its language, and its frank depiction of gay and straight sexuality.

It also provoked controversy with its portrayal of antisemitism and Nazi-ism, particularly in some of the musical performances on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub.

The song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" was mistakenly believed by some to be an actual Nazi anthem, but it was in fact written by the musical's songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, both of whom were Jewish.

Among those who had mixed feelings about "Cabaret" were the people associated with Christopher Isherwood in Berlin in the 1930s who provided models for the characters in his semi-autobiographical novella, "Goodbye to Berlin."

Isherwood moved to the city at the end of the Golden Twenties of the Weimar Republic.

He wanted to work on his writing, to immerse himself in Berlin's hedonistic culture, and to enjoy the artistic and personal freedom it offered him as an openly gay man at a time when homosexuals were subject to criminal prosecution.

He became friends with other British and American ex-patriot writers, including the poet and novelist, Stephen Spender, the composer and translator Paul Bowles, and the poet W. H. Auden.

Isherwood shared lodgings in Berlin with 19-year-old Jean Ross, the daughter of a wealthy British family who had come to the city to work in films.

When film work proved elusive, Ross modeled during the day and at night sang in bars and cabarets.

Ross became the model for Sally Bowles, but she was no Liza Minnelli.

Isherwood later wrote, "She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice.

She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides, yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her."

She was also unlike Sally Bowles in the nature of her subsequent career.

In the later '30s, she was a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and worked the remainder of her life as a writer, a film critic, and a political activist.

According to Ross's daughter, Sarah Caldwell, her mother was disgusted by her association with the character of Sally Bowles.

She resented the way Isherwood had turned her own lack of sexual inhibitions into Sally's mercenary habit of getting money from wealthy men by sleeping with them.

To Jean Ross, this reflected the traditional cultural dichotomy between good and bad girls that was the very antithesis of her own sexual emancipation.

She also thought Sally's political indifference was, in reality, more typical of Isherwood and his friends.

W. H. Auden later said Isherwood in Berlin held no opinions about anything.

Ross, who died in Surry, England, in 1973 never saw "Cabaret" or any of the other dramatic adaptation of Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin."

Both she and Isherwood's friend Stephen Spender said the story glamorized and distorted the harsh reality of Berlin in the early '30s.

Isherwood himself ultimately agreed.

In a 1956 essay, he lamented he had not really understood that Berlin in the early '30s was "a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation.

The wickedness of Berlin's nightlife was of the most pitiful kind.

The kisses and embraces, as always, had price tags attached to them.

As for the monsters, they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods.

The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.