One lives in a kind of oblivious, Pollyanna hope that the citizens of their country could never be so gullible and wicked as to give in to the propaganda that allowed a clearly deranged if not yet utterly psychopathic Adolf Hitler to rise to power. Alas, even many Americans are now not quite so stolid in their belief that it can’t happen here. Any time some politician is compared to Hitler, the rush is on to castigate that person for going too far and stepping over the line. The problem is that those who leap to protect their own from the accusations of being as bad as Hitler act as though the 1940’s Hitler was the same thing as the 1930’s Hitler. To compare someone to Hitler does not necessarily mean that they are suggesting the object of comparison is a lunatic ready to send millions to ovens. Surely, even those in post-war Germany would not have been willing to sit idly by and allow that Hitler to rise to power. Or perhaps, they would. The point is that they didn’t. And if it does nothing else—and it surely does a lot—Cabaret goes a long way toward reminding people of that fact.
It is a fact that needs reminding. The film tells a story about a country sinking lower and lower into decadence through song and dance and romance. But what is especially fascinating about Cabaret is the story it tells on the narrative periphery. The film made Liza Minnelli as famous as her mother, Judy Garland and it turned director Bob Fosse into a household name. The open sexuality inside the Kit Kat Klub bordered on S&M softcore pornography for its time and the songs are catchy. The title number is a particular showstopper uniquely suited for the unique talents of Minnelli. Meanwhile, Michael York comes out of Cabaret a heartthrob and one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood.
Despite all the wonderful performance and kinky song and dance and downright disquieting presence of Joel Grey’s M.C, however, the single most striking and memorable music moment features none of those celebrity heavyweights. In fact, even most fans of the film would be hard-pressed to name the actor who provides Cabaret its singular moment of gravitas that single-handedly lifts it up from the sphere of Broadway entertainment and places it into the realm of one of the most disturbing movies ever made. For all the ultraviolence of its main character, nothing in A Clockwork Orange—released just two weeks earlier—is as genuinely unsettling a portrait of a young would-be Hitler as the scene in Cabaret featuring the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Up to that point, the center of the film has been slowly coming apart at seams on its sides as the Nazis are first ridiculed, then attacked, the turn the tables on their attackers, then start gaining power. And then while everyone is enjoying a nice meal and knocking back a beer on a lazy weekend afternoon the full extent of their transformation is revealed not through violence or imagery Hitler or the SS or soldiers or concentration camps which are still a way off, but through the simple act of a seemingly angelic young blonde boy singing a nationalistic song of horrifying implications as those we’ve watched ignore the rise of fascism around them watch in horror as one by one people start standing up and singing along. A few—one or two—refuse, but the implication is impossible to ignore: it’s now too late to stop them and with that kind of public support behind them, you’d better learn that anything is about to become possible.
What Cabaret teaches through its scenes outside the Kit Kat Klub is that ignoring what is happening outside until what is happening outside starts forcing its way inside is the real secret to bringing down democracy. It is easy to recall the song and dance numbers of Cabaret because that is the draw; that is what brings you in. That self-hypnotic denial that the bullies ridiculed at the beginning could not possibly turn into the crowd of people raising their arms in a Heil Hitler salute is exactly the same narcotic that allows dangerous madmen to gain greater power when others are desperately trying to warn them that even Hitler didn’t start out with concentration camps and blitzkrieg.
