There is a moment in Cabaret, in my mind the single greatest musical ever made, that sets the film far apart from all other films of the genre. It happens in the second half of the in an outdoor beer garden where Sally, Brian and Max have stopped for refreshment. A beautiful young boy stands up and begins to sing, his face that of an angel, his blonde hair shining in the mid-day sun, his blue eyes almost piercing. His song, ”Tomorrow Belongs to Me” is an anthem for the youth, a soaring song about the joy the world holds for the youth of the next generation. The camera slowly pans down from the teenager’s face to reveal that he is a member of the Nazi Brown Shirt Party, and suddenly the mood shifts to something dark and terribly sinister. He becomes obsessed with the song, his passion and voice rising, the people in the outdoor garden joining in singing to the increasingly passionate lyrics, though the elderly decline. We see at once how Hitler seduced Germany, through its youth, through promises of a bright tomorrow and suddenly Cabaret becomes unlike any movie musical ever made.

Of all the genres in film, the musical is my least favorite, though I count this one as one of the greatest films, not musicals, films ever made. No bursting in song in the middle of the Alps, no running through the streets singing songs with no story point at all, but rather an intense dark look at the impact of Nazism on Berlin in 1931 and the effect it would have on the lives of two young lovers from different parts of the world. Brain (Michael York) comes to Berlin to teach English and meets night club singer Sally Bowles (Minnelli) a talented woman who will do anything for success, including sleep her way to the top. He enters into a relationship with Sally which he must know is doomed from the beginning, and they walk a precarious line towards a threesome with a wealthy bi-sexual Max, who has larger eyes for Brian than he does Sally. Finding out that Max and Brian have sletp together Sally is stunned at the betrayal, but far worse more upset at being pregnant and not knowing who the father is. Brian agrees to marry her and raise the child, but Sally unable to leave her dream of being famous, sells her fur coat to pay for an abortion, enraging Brian who leaves her to continue singing her heart out for the audience, now mostly Nazis of the Kit Kat Club.

Read more on Historical Circuit: Cabaret (****)…

The trees sway gently back and forth, as the screen goes from black to this image. It is a tropical jungle setting, and in the distance we here something oddly familiar. Helicopters? A yellow mist moves across the screen, and the beginnings of a song are heard on the track. Suddenly the jungle explodes in an inferno of fire, helicopters zipping by and Jim Morrison of The Doors begins to croon, ‘This is the end, my only friend, the end.” The apocalypse, this apocalypse has begun and we have been plunged into the nightmare that was American involvement in Viet Nam. Willard (Martin Sheen) an army assassin is waiting for a mission, slowly becoming unhinged in his filthy hotel room, drinking heavily and sparring naked
with his reflection in the mirror he will break, coating his face with the blood that seeps from his wounded hand, before he falls over sobbing on the floor. He gets his mission, sent into the dark jungle of Cambodia to terminate “with extreme prejudice” a decorated Colonel who has lost control and waged his own war against both the Americans and the Viet Cong. Willard is being sent to kill Kurtz (Marlon Brando) one of the military’s most decorated men, who has seen too much and lost touch with reality. By the time he has completed his journey, Willard will
understand what happened to Kurtz and come to know precisely why he went mad. The journey upriver takes him through the nightmare that is Viet Nam, where we see soldiers fighting a war without a commanding officer, and an entire village wiped out so a Colonel can see his boys go surfing. Encountering Kilgore (Robert Duvall) takes the film to such a fever pitch, it never quite recovers, but it is one of the most astonishing sequences ever filmed.

Read more on Historical Circuit: Apocalypse Now (****)…

Michael Cimino’s much maligned western epic is often discussed as being among the worst films ever made and the greatest failure in cinema history. It is neither, though it does represent the film that ended the directors’ era of the seventies, a time when filmmakers had complete freedom and access to the deep pockets of the studios. Heaven’s Gate (1980) is an example of a film ruined by the directors’ ego, self indulgence, and blind belief in his project without ever having the ability to see what was happening around him. Cimino was the toast of the town when United Artists signed him to direct Heaven’s Gate, a film based on his own screenplay, and originally budgeted at nine million dollars. He had recently won Academy Awards for best director and best picture for his searing study of the impact of
the Viet Nam war on a small community in The Deer Hunter (1978). United Artists (UA) believed that Cimino could helm the studio’s next great film, their next Oscar winner and their belief led them to give the director whatever he wanted, which was the beginning of the nightmare that would bankrupt the studio. Over the course of 1978 through to the ill fated release of the film in November of 1980, the studio marched silently towards bankruptcy, caused directly by Cimino and his overages on this film. What started at nine, quickly elevated to thirteen, then eighteen, then twenty five at which point the studio panicked and spoke to another director about finishing the film. Knowing that the union would never stand for their recent Directors Guild of America Award as Best Director being fired from his own film, the studio decided to finish the film, for thirty million. Still Cimino kept up his nonsense and the budget tapped out at forty four million dollars. The picture was delivered more than a year late, ran five hours, and was unwatchable. Beyond being vastly overlong, the film is noisy, and many sequences cannot be seen because of the dust on the screen. Where the average battle scene in a film takes twenty minutes, the one in Heaven’s Gate goes on and on and on.

Read more on Historical Circuit: Heaven’s Gate (**)…