So, we've finally come to AFI's token gay(ish) movie, I guess. Couldn't be Brokeback Mountain, or The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert or Philadelphia, or Were the World Mine, or In and Out, or one of the other dozens of good gay movies out there. Actually, I lied. Those are all the good gay movies out there. All right, fine. I guess this is the only one with Liza.
Plot summary (with spoilers): Wilkomen! Bienvenue! Welcome! The Kit Kat Klub is proud to present, Fraulein Sally Bowles! It's Berlin, 1931, a totally safe and uneventful time in Germany's history. American singer Lucille 2 (um..I mean, Sally) performs nightly at the Kit Kat Klub and lives in a little apartment nearby. The Master of Ceremonies welcomes the audience to the Klub, (after the bouncer kicks out a couple of Nazis) and sings as song with the "girls", mostly men in drag, plus Sally, who is also kinda a man in drag.
After work, Englishman Brian Roberts answers Sally's ad for a roommate, and the two hit if off fabulously. Brian is stuffy and British and Sally is wild and impetuous and she makes him do crazy, exhilarating things like scream really loud when a train goes by. I guess there was no TV.
Brian makes a living teaching English to foreigners and his first two students, a German Christian named Fritz and a Jewish woman named Natalia immediately form a bit of a love connection that I'm sure will not lead to any problems in the future. Sally had liked Fritz and is a bit jealous to see him with the other more demure woman, so she aggressively hits on Brian. He puts her off, hilariously complaining that it's a "bit too early in the morning for that sort of thing" until she sarcastically says "maybe you don't like girls" and his reaction is a dead giveaway. She's stunned, which is silly, because it's a scientific fact that 90% of British men are at least bi. (Harry, call me!) He says he's been with only three girls and it was bad every time, and now he's happy being a woman's eunuch gay best friend like on Will and Grace.
So Sally and Brian become besties as any gay man would with Dorothy's daughter, and more songs are sung in the Klub, and the MC does more crazy stuff on stage and I don't mind telling you at the risk of being immodest I would kill as the MC in a stage production. But anyway.
Sally dates another man in the show and he dumps her cruelly. She's crying at home and Brian comforts her, and one thing leads to another and they decide together that those three girls "were the wrong three girls". Uh huh.
Meanwhile. the Nazis begin growing in power, to the point that Natalia says she no longer feels comfortable dating the German Fritz and she leaves him.
Then, Sally meets a rich and handsome playboy named Maximillan, and the twosome expand their world to make room for three. They go for a weekend trip to Max's chateau, and on the way they see a couple of Nazis being arrested by the police. Max says the Nazis are useful thugs because they helpfully beat up dirty communists. At the chateau, everyone drinks a lot and Sally starts dancing around and Max swoops in to dance with her, and just as Brian is about to quietly slip out of the room, they pull him into their embrace and the sexual-confusion tension is so thick you could cut it with a threeway. Oh, to be 19 again. I've said too much.
But Brian can't hold his liquor and he passes out and Sally goes upstairs with Max. The next morning, Max wakes up Brian and tells him Sally's left, but they could totally still hang out. They go to an outdoor park and sit on the grass. A crowd of people are there, hanging out, eating lunch. Suddenly, a beautiful, cherubic young blond man begins to sing the song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me". It's sweet, until the camera pans down to reveals his Nazi uniform. Then, many other young people in the crowd stand up and start singing as well. Turns out, nearly everyone in the park is a Nazi. It's like when you see a couple dozen ants crawling around, and then suddenly your eyes adjust and you realize there's actually a thousand ants. Ants who commit genocide. Max and Brian quickly motor it back to their car. All the scenes with songs are great, though this is easily the movie's best scene. (And can I say how much it sucks that that song is probably my favorite? I always felt guilty singing along when I played the soundtrack).
Some time later, Max drops Brian off back at his apartment. Hmm...I want the deleted scene!
Sally doesn't come home until the next day, and when Brian screams at her, demanding to know where she was, she says she needed to clear her head after spending the weekend with Max, and he lobs her the softball, "Screw Max!" to which she replies, "I do!" and he comes back for the win with "So do I!" They call each other bastards, and she stomps off, feeling whatever the girl version of emasculated is.
She can't stay mad at him though, and soon discovers that she's pregnant. She tells him she wants an abortion, until Brian begs to marry her and pretend they know for certain the baby is his. They get crazy drunk and agree to get married.
But in the cold light of day, Sally remembers the way Brian looked at Max and finally can't bring herself to try to make a family with a man who will never truly be in love with her. She has the abortion and tells Brian about it. He yells impotently at her for a bit, then sees the wisdom in her decision. Unfortunately, once the gay guy makes the girl have to get an abortion, the fun is officially over. He leaves the apartment, heading back to England and probably saving himself from getting fitted for a pink triangle very shortly.
The MC introduces Sally and she sings a final song about life being a silly, carefree cabaret, and on the last note, when the camera swings around to the audience it reveals a packed house of brown shirted goons. And the worst part is, they don't even clap.
Review: The songs are all awesome, top drawer stuff. I like how, unlike the play, all the songs took place in the context of the real world, and no one just upped and started singing randomly. And the songs all reflected what was going on in the character's lives. Liza is a great singer and dancer, and plays the part excellently. Joel Grey as the MC is fine, he definitely can sing, but there's a manic energy that's lacking there. (I stand by my earlier assertion that I could do it better, though the singing might be a problem). The "love" story, such as it is, is a very accurate representation of what it's like to be college aged and stupid and schoompy in all the wrong places, and when I first saw this movie when I was 20, that stuff hit me on an emotional level that it didn't this time. I thought I would definitely give this at least four stars, but as I said, surprisingly, the emotional connection just wasn't there at all this time around. Maybe it was the chasteness of the storyline; no doubt a character even admitting he was gay in 1972 was really shocking, but now in 2011 it's more than a little annoying that Sally and Brian get to roll around in bed together but Brian and Max get the fade out treatment. So instead of being emotionally involved, I was much more about judging these fools for getting caught up in all the 90210 crap when the Nazis slowly but surely taking over all around them. I think that's mostly the point. You could almost look at the Nazis as a metaphor for adulthood, really, the unwanted intruder creeping up when you least want or expect it to. It's time to stop being polite and start getting real. The freaking Nazis are coming.
Stars: Three and a half out of five.
Next, "American Graffiti", and then "Sullivan's Travels", which not only have I not seen, but I've never even heard of. Haven't seen "Graffiti" either, unless you count Happy Days.
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