← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 16367 | Posts: 30 | Started: 2005-01-20
2005-01-20 09:31 | User Profile
Work and family matters have conspired to separate me from my wife and kids for the past few months, and I've taken to filling my empty evenings with lots of old movies. I justify this very unseemly indolence (Jonathan Edwards would not have approved) by viewing them from the seat of my fancy-schmancy, gym-quality exercycle (with all bells and whistles, including interface for the home entertainment center. I could surf the freeking internet on this thing.)
Last night I watched the [URL=http://www.nodanw.com/biographies/bob_fosse.htm]Bob Fosse [/URL] film "[URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00009Y3L4/qid=1106211710/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9965927-4647262?v=glance&s=dvd]Cabaret[/URL]." I haven't seen this thing since I was a teenager in 1972. I didn't really know what to make of it then. I remember being shocked by all the moral decay, but convinced that the protaganists were really cool. I wanted to be a Bohemian in Berlin. At least for a while.
Over thirty years later I'm a fat middle aged guy (with great stress test results and a clean slate from my last colonoscopy, thank you very much) on an overpriced exercycle viewing this artifact of the 1960's Great Cultural Revolution with a much more jaundiced, and more appreciative, eye.
First, this flick is a fine work of art. I'm generally not a show tunes kind of a guy (although the tunes are very catchy, and the eponomous "Cabaret" became a monster hit, as "Money Makes the World Go Round" became [URL=http://www.biography.com/search/article.jsp?aid=9409583&search=minnelli]Liza Minelli's[/URL] signature song), but I am compelled to admit that Bob Fosse's staging of the song and dance numbers is simply wonderful. Marvelous performances by the much younger Liza Minelli. I never thought she was much to look at (there's a shot of her in a modest swimming suit, and she has a rather mannish build, not my thing), but let's face it the girl could act. No wonder the fags love her. She's just like them. Slutty yet innocent. Strong yet vulnerable. Talented yet misunderstood.
And [URL=http://www.bfi.org.uk/collections/release/cabaret/joelgrey.html]Joel Grey [/URL] (nee Katz) as the Master of Ceremonies was just over the top. What a showman. What an unbelievable stage presence. What an easy facility with dance and the interpretive feeling of a song. I think that some of Bob Fosse's camera shots were just perfect, including the final bloodcurdling pan to the cracked mirror of the Cabaret.
I realize now that I totally missed the message of the film. The message was NOT that the corrupt protaganists Sally (Minelli) and Brian ([URL=http://www.filmbug.com/db/4370]Michael York[/URL]) were young, daring, cool and worthy of emulation, it was rather that moral corruption is a very banal thing, which destroys both individuals and the societies who engage in it. I see Sally and Brian now as being weak, mixed-up, pitiful figures, wallowing in their own selfish misery.
Sally and Brian decend into the Cabaret's boozy world of sexual immorality, where Sally performs on stage in bawdy Cabaret routines and turns a few tricks on the side. They take up with the Prussian aristocrat Maximillian, who uses them both as sexual handiwipes and then dismisses them with a curt note and a few marks when he's through with them. Sally winds up pregnant and drinking hard. Brian says he'll marry her, not knowing whether the child is his or Maximillian's.
They try to become a regular couple, and try to look the part. There's a scene where they're in the woods on a family picnic. Very idyllic, but Brian is withdrawn, thinking about something that's really bothering him (obviously thinking of Maximillian and how he jilted him, mouning the loss of his homosexual lover). Sally tries to draw him out by playing the perfect little housewife, but fails. Brian is sad, distant. Sally is also dissatisfied, obviously faking the entire wholesome routine, putting a good face on a bad situation. This is not what they have become, and they both know it. It's too late for them. Sally finally aborts the baby, saying that after all of that they can't achieve normal family life, because she'd be constantly drawn to the corrupt night life, and he'd be drawn to more homosexual affairs, as he had with Maximillian.
This moral corruption of the Weimar Republic is presented very clearly as CAUSING the reaction - first by the Communists, then by the triumphant Nazis. There's a heartstopping scene of Maximillian, Sally and Brian in a cafe carrying on after some sexual escapade, when a beautiful Aryan boy in a Nazi uniform stands up and sings a simple patriotic song in an angelic tenor voice. His voice is pure and he's bathed in light. The crowd joins in the song, [URL=http://www.filmbug.com/db/4370]Tomorrow Belongs to Me[/URL]:
[I]Oh Fatherland, Fatherland Show us the sign Your children have waited to see The morning will come when the world is mine Tomorrow belongs to me[/I]
They end in a Nazi salute. I couldn't help but to be moved by the thing. Those dispossessed Germans - with weary, hungry looks in their eyes - standing up and singing a simple patriotic song in the face of their adversity was a powerful message of hope. I think that the film says this hope was terribly misguided, but it also drives home the point that the German people were right to want to take Germany back from the Jewish magnates, corrupt Old World aristocracy, and the assorted perverted riff-raff sybolized by the Cabaret.
The film makes an equally powerful statement about the cause of all this dissolution: nihilism. The final song, "[URL=http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/c/cabaretlyrics/cabaretlyrics.html]Cabaret[/URL]", tells the story of a prostitute ("as a matter of fact she rented by the hour") named Elsie ("from Chelsea") who died of drug addiction and alcoholism ("well that's what comes from too much pills and liquour"). But Elsie is viewed as being worthy of emulation ("when I go, I'll go like Elsie") because she was nothing but a corpse ("the happiest corpse I'd ever seen"). There was no soul for Elsie to worry about. No afterlife. No Final Judgement for leading a morally reprehensible life. The body is all that there is. There is no God, and since there is no God, why not find what pleasure you can in drugs and alcohol and pay for the whole thing by selling sex? The song "[URL=http://www.ocap.ca/songs/moneymon.html]Money Makes the World Go Round[/URL]" really hammers this home, as the sexually ambiguous EmCee covorts on stage with Sally, dropping coins down his pants, and making obscene gestures toward Sally. The song makes a reference to the hunger of Germany in the early 1930's (Hunger shows up at the window) and prostitution is celebrated here as a way to make ends meet.
[I]When you haven't any coal in the stove and you freeze in the winter And you curse to the wind at your fate. When you haven't any shoes on your feet and your coat's thin as paper And you look thirty pounds underweight, When you go to get a word of advice from the fat little pastor, he will tell you to love evermore. But when hunger comes to rap, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, at the window See how love flies out the door. For money makes the world go around, the world go around . . . [/I]
The subplot of Fritz and Natalia - the two Jews - is generally empathetic toward Jews, but that said it is also somewhat ambiguous. Fritz is a crypto Jew and an amoral golddigger like Brian and Sally, but instead of chasing after Max he goes after a young Jewish heiress in the hopes of marrying her. Natalia says that marrying Fritz (whom she thought was a Christian) would break her father's heart, really emphasizing the out-of-placedness of Jews in Berlin. I mean, what in the world were they even doing there? How could they think the Germans would react to them, to their owning all the department stores in Berlin as did Natalia's father while Hunger was at their windows? Their marriage in the synagogue is attended by Sally and Brian - who at the height of their corruption are dressed in their sabbath best.
The moral ambiguity doesn't stop there, as the Nazis are also presented negatively overall, but then again not without their positive side. Exhibit A establishes that they were indeed thugs, where they beat the crap out of people who disagree with them (they beat Brian senseless and beat to DEATH a Cabaret patron who boots them out of the Cabaret). So, on the one hand they're thugs, but on the other they're healthy German boys who sing patriotic songs while bathed in Bob Fosse's brilliant, magical lighting. Exhibit B is the main crypto Nazi. Brian and Sally live at a boarding house, and there's a middleaged man there who in the end of the film argues forcefully for the Nazis, claiming that there is a conspiracy between the bankers and the Communists, playing one side against the other (he was right, of course). He has a scene with Brian, who calls him a horse's ass for his beliefs. Now, this man was a pornographer - he wrote and published dirty books for a living. That obviously implicates him and the Nazis in Weimar corruption (as does their appearance in the Cabaret in the last song), but that said Brian TRANSLATED these pornographic works into English for a British audience ("Brian, do you think this will arouse people in London?) for 50 marks. Sally landed Brian the job. So Brian is no better than this crypto Nazi fellow, in fact he's portrayed as his gopher. He translated corrupting trash into English knowing that it was aimed at his countrymen, and never gave it a second thought.
And after Max and Brian get together sexually, Brian finally accepts an extremely expensive, gold cigarette case from Max. Brian is portrayed as being a bigger whore than Sally, who was willing to screw anything that walked for a little caviar and the chance at another audition.
The inescapable conclusion seems to be that Sally and Brian in a very real sense CAUSED the reaction that wound up engulfing the whole world, or at least they contributed to it. They were part of the problem of general immorality, and the film seems to suggest that the solution lies in rejecting the Cabaret and its nihilism completely, although nobody in the film seems to actually do that (while I guess it could be said that Fritz and Natalia have a chance at achieving a traditional marriage, although they no doubt face a grim fate). Indeed, the final shot is of EmCee leaving the stage, as the camera pans to a distorted mirror that reveals a number of Nazi officers sitting there, enjoying the show.
Anyway, I think that all in all, this film was a powerful indictment of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. It was a warning that general sexual immorality combined with the sell-your-soul-for-fifty-marks attitude of Weimar Germany can only lead to reaction of one kind or another that will sweep it all away. Immorality threatens to bring down to destruction both the individuals who give themselves over to it and the socieities that tolerate it. I think that was the main point. It was something I totally missed 32 years ago.
With the fifty-fifty hindsight the film appears prescient, even prophetic, in its warning about the long-term affects of the Sexual Revolution. Since then we've seen countless dead in the AIDS pandemic, 40 million American babies (of all races) murdered legally in America beginning in 1973 (one year after Sally had her shed-a-tear-and-move-on abortion in this 1972 film), the growing acceptance of thuggery, and the unending encroachments on our civil liberties culminating in Shrub legalizing torture and SCOTUS making a mockery of habeus corpus, and the list could go on.
Great flick, I urge you to take a second look. I'd love to hear your comments.
Walter
2005-01-20 10:37 | User Profile
How many kids do you have, Walter?
:thumbsup:
Petr
2005-01-20 13:54 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Since then we've seen countless dead in the AIDS pandemic.....[/QUOTE]
Didn't Bob Fosse die of AIDS?
In any case, excellent review Walter. Indeed, when one re-views an old film not seen since teenage or young adult years, much more nuance in the film's message is suddenly more clear to the wiser adult. It often happens to me and I say "How did I not see [I]that[/I] when I first saw it". It's one reason I re-viewed all the Stanley Kubrick classics.
Also, there's something very moving and uplifting about a Nazi Youth singing Germanic folk songs [I]a capella[/I] or in chorus.
And finally, yes, the USA today is the Wiemar Republic of yesterday's Germany. The parallels are frightening. The end results of that sin are even more horrific. So it goes.
2005-01-20 14:57 | User Profile
[QUOTE=xmetalhead]Didn't Bob Fosse die of AIDS?
In any case, excellent review Walter. Indeed, when one re-views an old film not seen since teenage or young adult years, much more nuance in the film's message is suddenly more clear to the wiser adult. It often happens to me and I say "How did I not see [I]that[/I] when I first saw it". It's one reason I re-viewed all the Stanley Kubrick classics.
Also, there's something very moving and uplifting about a Nazi Youth singing Germanic folk songs [I]a capella[/I] or in chorus.
And finally, yes, the USA today is the Wiemar Republic of yesterday's Germany. The parallels are frightening. The end results of that sin are even more horrific. So it goes.[/QUOTE]
Thanks.
It looks like[URL=http://www.nodanw.com/biographies/bob_fosse.htm] Bob Fosse [/URL] wasn't gay (married twice), and it looks like he died from cigarettes and generally leading a crazy life.
His largely autobiographical film "[URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00003CX8U/qid=1106233014/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9965927-4647262?v=glance&s=dvd]All That Jazz[/URL]" was another one I didn't like when I saw it as a young man (it came out in 1979), but came to admire it greatly. That film was about the death of a choreographer (a straight man who banged all his female protoges), and who died from burning the candle at both ends too long.
2005-01-20 21:27 | User Profile
Thanks, Walter, for the detailed and thoughtful review.
A brief preface:
I should explain, for a few of the younger readers around here, that before VCRs and DVDs, once a film had gone out of general release it was distributed to second-run movie houses for showing, at reduced rates. My wife and I, not having much money in those days, patronized one called "The Original 99-cent Roxy," because that was the price of admission.
The Roxy had once been a fairly respectable theater, but was now in a shabby (but still White) part of town, and we'd take the subway down to the Roxy every week or so to catch the films we hadn't been able to afford during their initial run. We saw a lot of films that way, some of them strange and obscure, others quite well-known still.
Now, because of its low cost and its management's lenient policy on drug usage among the patrons, the Roxy quickly became "the hippie theater," where what was left of the failed Counterculture by the mid-seventies would gather to smoke dope -- and occasional harder chemicals -- while enjoying the film. There was always a thick marijuana haze in the projector beam on Friday and Saturday nights.
Anyway, the night that [I]Cabaret[/I] was playing at the Roxy, you'd have expected the Flower Power Free Love audience to have roundly cheered the Sally and Brian characters and boo-hissed the Evil Nazis. But such was not the case. And that unforgettable scene to which you allude, in which the stalwart Hitler Youth boy stands up and sings [I]Tomorrow Belongs to Me[/I] as the surrounding crowd joins in, got a resounding cheer. Even more remarkably, when, during the song, a bearded, dreadlocked jew squirms in discomfort, peals of loud and raucous laughter rolled throughout the theater.
This little trip down memory lane has been my way of saying, yes, in spite of its flaws, this is a film with great power, and I've always been surprised that the [I]hubris[/I] of The Chosen was so great that they released this one, expecting nationwide audiences to react the same way as their pals in the Heebiewood freak-show community. What a miscalculation!
The late Dr. Pierce devoted considerable time in one of his weekly broadcasts to [I]Cabaret[/I], which he said was one of his favorite films. The kosher kabal, he believed, intended audiences to identify with Sally and Brian, while reviling the dread Nazis. But instead, [I]Cabaret[/I] served only to expose the loathsome degeneracy of the 100% kosher Weimar Republic, and reveal -- probably for the first and last time in a Heebiewood film -- the National Socialists as the dedicated reformers they were. True, we do see the Nazis behaving with brutality, but as the film progresses, it's hard for the average White viewer not to draw the conclusion that a squalid social order such as Weimar could only be eradicated by brutal methods. That, according to Dr. Pierce, was why he so loved [I]Cabaret[/I], and I'm inclined to agree. Certainly, [I]Tomorrow Belongs to Me[/I] instantly became one of my favorite anthems (Hmmm... wonder why it doesn't get revived, the way other themes from old musicals do? Can anyone think of a reason, kids?).
The two leads, Liza Minelli and Michael York, were perfectly cast. Minelli, then, as now, as squalid a tart as ever fellated her way to stardom, has the role of a lifetime as Sally. And York, at the peak of his 70s popularity, projects exactly the kind of confused sexuality that you'd expect from a Brian.
I do disagree with you, though, Walter, on a couple of lesser points. First, I didn't then and don't now see "sexual immorality" as the defining evil of [I]Cabaret's[/I] Weimar. The rot is far too deep and wide to define in solely in terms of Christian concepts of sin. Berlin is simply a sea -- or should we say a sewer? -- of degeneracy in every aspect of life, in everything its unknowingly damned inhabitants do. The disgusting sexual goings-on of Sally and Brian are metaphors for the maggot-ridden general cultural decay of prewar Germany, and should not, I think, be taken as some specific condemnation of sexual profligacy (and, given Bob Fosse's own personal life, I can't imagine him seeing sexual profligacy per se as something to be avoided, let alone condemned).
Also, though this is surely open to personal interpretation, I never saw Brian's hesitations about Sally as indicative of some permanent attraction toward what today would be delicately called "the gay lifestyle." As I've always seen it, he is at first shocked and disgusted by Sally's antics, but then, finally by his own.
In fact, it is quite possible to view Sally herself as a personification of the Weimar decay -- brassy, anything-goes, no standards -- and Brian as the Aryan man who is initially tempted to the point of sampling her decayed pleasures, but is finally repelled. What's bothering him during the picnic scene, I think, is that he's beginning to realize in what slime he's been wallowing, and is having a hard time living with himself. Sally's abortion is the last straw, tearing the scales from his eyes and waking him up at last.
The "thirty-second soundbyte history of WWII" at the very end has always seemed to me to be a tack-on, as if someone at the Head Office was beginning to have doubts that the [I]goyim[/I] would draw the appropriate semitically-correct conclusions. I'm not so naive as to believe that [I]Cabaret[/I] is a pro-Nazi film, but I do think it's as close to pro-Nazi as any major Heebiewood film has ever been.
My bottom line: Degenerate sex is certainly pervasive throughout the film, but nevertheless I can't agree that it's [I]about[/I] degenerate sex; the Seventies had no problem at all with whores and homosexuals. It's about what happens to a society that abandons all the things it has ever stood for and can only chant "If it feels good, do it!" as it sinks into the abyss.
Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
PS: "The Gorilla Song" is a scream. Try to imagine someone waltzing with Susan Sontag as it plays in the background.
2005-01-20 21:36 | User Profile
[B][I] - "The rot is far too deep and wide to define in solely in terms of Christian concepts of sin."[/I][/B]
May I remind you that it was Christianity that created and popularized the idea of some population being so contaminated with sin and filth that it's time to lay aside your morality sermons and pick up the flamethrower instead, metaphorically speaking.
(I am of course referring to the story of Sodom)
Petr
2005-01-20 22:53 | User Profile
Walter Yannis,
A great article.
2005-01-21 01:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=xmetalhead]And finally, yes, the USA today is the Wiemar Republic of yesterday's Germany. The parallels are frightening. The end results of that sin are even more horrific. So it goes.[/QUOTE]Don't want to draw parallels too close, but NYC or some of our big modern Northern or European cities certainly are modern day Berlins.
Far rightists have always been fascinated by the Weimar Republic. I've personally found though it is difficult to learn too much from total depravity. Studying the Nazi's I'm struck by the fact that the stench of that place was so great that it really reached out and corrupted them too, making their efforts at reform ultimately ineffective.
2005-01-21 02:26 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Work and family matters have conspired to separate me from my wife and kids for the past few months, and I've taken to filling my empty evenings with lots of old movies. I justify this very unseemly indolence (Jonathan Edwards would not have approved) by viewing them from the seat of my fancy-schmancy, gym-quality exercycle (with all bells and whistles, including interface for the home entertainment center. I could surf the freeking internet on this thing.)
Last night I watched the [URL=http://www.nodanw.com/biographies/bob_fosse.htm]Bob Fosse [/URL] film "[URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00009Y3L4/qid=1106211710/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9965927-4647262?v=glance&s=dvd]Cabaret[/URL]." I haven't seen this thing since I was a teenager in 1972. I didn't really know what to make of it then. I remember being shocked by all the moral decay, but convinced that the protaganists were really cool. I wanted to be a Bohemian in Berlin. At least for a while.
Over thirty years later I'm a fat middle aged guy (with great stress test results and a clean slate from my last colonoscopy, thank you very much) on an overpriced exercycle viewing this artifact of the 1960's Great Cultural Revolution with a much more jaundiced, and more appreciative, eye.
First, this flick is a fine work of art. I'm generally not a show tunes kind of a guy (although the tunes are very catchy, and the eponomous "Cabaret" became a monster hit, as "Money Makes the World Go Round" became [URL=http://www.biography.com/search/article.jsp?aid=9409583&search=minnelli]Liza Minelli's[/URL] signature song), but I am compelled to admit that Bob Fosse's staging of the song and dance numbers is simply wonderful. Marvelous performances by the much younger Liza Minelli. I never thought she was much to look at (there's a shot of her in a modest swimming suit, and she has a rather mannish build, not my thing), but let's face it the girl could act. No wonder the fags love her. She's just like them. Slutty yet innocent. Strong yet vulnerable. Talented yet misunderstood.
And [URL=http://www.bfi.org.uk/collections/release/cabaret/joelgrey.html]Joel Grey [/URL] (nee Katz) as the Master of Ceremonies was just over the top. What a showman. What an unbelievable stage presence. What an easy facility with dance and the interpretive feeling of a song. I think that some of Bob Fosse's camera shots were just perfect, including the final bloodcurdling pan to the cracked mirror of the Cabaret.
I realize now that I totally missed the message of the film. The message was NOT that the corrupt protaganists Sally (Minelli) and Brian ([URL=http://www.filmbug.com/db/4370]Michael York[/URL]) were young, daring, cool and worthy of emulation, it was rather that moral corruption is a very banal thing, which destroys both individuals and the societies who engage in it. I see Sally and Brian now as being weak, mixed-up, pitiful figures, wallowing in their own selfish misery.
Sally and Brian decend into the Cabaret's boozy world of sexual immorality, where Sally performs on stage in bawdy Cabaret routines and turns a few tricks on the side. They take up with the Prussian aristocrat Maximillian, who uses them both as sexual handiwipes and then dismisses them with a curt note and a few marks when he's through with them. Sally winds up pregnant and drinking hard. Brian says he'll marry her, not knowing whether the child is his or Maximillian's.
They try to become a regular couple, and try to look the part. There's a scene where they're in the woods on a family picnic. Very idyllic, but Brian is withdrawn, thinking about something that's really bothering him (obviously thinking of Maximillian and how he jilted him, mouning the loss of his homosexual lover). Sally tries to draw him out by playing the perfect little housewife, but fails. Brian is sad, distant. Sally is also dissatisfied, obviously faking the entire wholesome routine, putting a good face on a bad situation. This is not what they have become, and they both know it. It's too late for them. Sally finally aborts the baby, saying that after all of that they can't achieve normal family life, because she'd be constantly drawn to the corrupt night life, and he'd be drawn to more homosexual affairs, as he had with Maximillian.
This moral corruption of the Weimar Republic is presented very clearly as CAUSING the reaction - first by the Communists, then by the triumphant Nazis. There's a heartstopping scene of Maximillian, Sally and Brian in a cafe carrying on after some sexual escapade, when a beautiful Aryan boy in a Nazi uniform stands up and sings a simple patriotic song in an angelic tenor voice. His voice is pure and he's bathed in light. The crowd joins in the song, [URL=http://www.filmbug.com/db/4370]Tomorrow Belongs to Me[/URL]:
[I]Oh Fatherland, Fatherland Show us the sign Your children have waited to see The morning will come when the world is mine Tomorrow belongs to me[/I]
They end in a Nazi salute. I couldn't help but to be moved by the thing. Those dispossessed Germans - with weary, hungry looks in their eyes - standing up and singing a simple patriotic song in the face of their adversity was a powerful message of hope. I think that the film says this hope was terribly misguided, but it also drives home the point that the German people were right to want to take Germany back from the Jewish magnates, corrupt Old World aristocracy, and the assorted perverted riff-raff sybolized by the Cabaret.
The film makes an equally powerful statement about the cause of all this dissolution: nihilism. The final song, "[URL=http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/c/cabaretlyrics/cabaretlyrics.html]Cabaret[/URL]", tells the story of a prostitute ("as a matter of fact she rented by the hour") named Elsie ("from Chelsea") who died of drug addiction and alcoholism ("well that's what comes from too much pills and liquour"). But Elsie is viewed as being worthy of emulation ("when I go, I'll go like Elsie") because she was nothing but a corpse ("the happiest corpse I'd ever seen"). There was no soul for Elsie to worry about. No afterlife. No Final Judgement for leading a morally reprehensible life. The body is all that there is. There is no God, and since there is no God, why not find what pleasure you can in drugs and alcohol and pay for the whole thing by selling sex? The song "[URL=http://www.ocap.ca/songs/moneymon.html]Money Makes the World Go Round[/URL]" really hammers this home, as the sexually ambiguous EmCee covorts on stage with Sally, dropping coins down his pants, and making obscene gestures toward Sally. The song makes a reference to the hunger of Germany in the early 1930's (Hunger shows up at the window) and prostitution is celebrated here as a way to make ends meet.
[I]When you haven't any coal in the stove and you freeze in the winter And you curse to the wind at your fate. When you haven't any shoes on your feet and your coat's thin as paper And you look thirty pounds underweight, When you go to get a word of advice from the fat little pastor, he will tell you to love evermore. But when hunger comes to rap, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, at the window See how love flies out the door. For money makes the world go around, the world go around . . . [/I]
The subplot of Fritz and Natalia - the two Jews - is generally empathetic toward Jews, but that said it is also somewhat ambiguous. Fritz is a crypto Jew and an amoral golddigger like Brian and Sally, but instead of chasing after Max he goes after a young Jewish heiress in the hopes of marrying her. Natalia says that marrying Fritz (whom she thought was a Christian) would break her father's heart, really emphasizing the out-of-placedness of Jews in Berlin. I mean, what in the world were they even doing there? How could they think the Germans would react to them, to their owning all the department stores in Berlin as did Natalia's father while Hunger was at their windows? Their marriage in the synagogue is attended by Sally and Brian - who at the height of their corruption are dressed in their sabbath best.
The moral ambiguity doesn't stop there, as the Nazis are also presented negatively overall, but then again not without their positive side. Exhibit A establishes that they were indeed thugs, where they beat the crap out of people who disagree with them (they beat Brian senseless and beat to DEATH a Cabaret patron who boots them out of the Cabaret). So, on the one hand they're thugs, but on the other they're healthy German boys who sing patriotic songs while bathed in Bob Fosse's brilliant, magical lighting. Exhibit B is the main crypto Nazi. Brian and Sally live at a boarding house, and there's a middleaged man there who in the end of the film argues forcefully for the Nazis, claiming that there is a conspiracy between the bankers and the Communists, playing one side against the other (he was right, of course). He has a scene with Brian, who calls him a horse's ass for his beliefs. Now, this man was a pornographer - he wrote and published dirty books for a living. That obviously implicates him and the Nazis in Weimar corruption (as does their appearance in the Cabaret in the last song), but that said Brian TRANSLATED these pornographic works into English for a British audience ("Brian, do you think this will arouse people in London?) for 50 marks. Sally landed Brian the job. So Brian is no better than this crypto Nazi fellow, in fact he's portrayed as his gopher. He translated corrupting trash into English knowing that it was aimed at his countrymen, and never gave it a second thought.
And after Max and Brian get together sexually, Brian finally accepts an extremely expensive, gold cigarette case from Max. Brian is portrayed as being a bigger whore than Sally, who was willing to screw anything that walked for a little caviar and the chance at another audition.
The inescapable conclusion seems to be that Sally and Brian in a very real sense CAUSED the reaction that wound up engulfing the whole world, or at least they contributed to it. They were part of the problem of general immorality, and the film seems to suggest that the solution lies in rejecting the Cabaret and its nihilism completely, although nobody in the film seems to actually do that (while I guess it could be said that Fritz and Natalia have a chance at achieving a traditional marriage, although they no doubt face a grim fate). Indeed, the final shot is of EmCee leaving the stage, as the camera pans to a distorted mirror that reveals a number of Nazi officers sitting there, enjoying the show.
Anyway, I think that all in all, this film was a powerful indictment of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. It was a warning that general sexual immorality combined with the sell-your-soul-for-fifty-marks attitude of Weimar Germany can only lead to reaction of one kind or another that will sweep it all away. Immorality threatens to bring down to destruction both the individuals who give themselves over to it and the socieities that tolerate it. I think that was the main point. It was something I totally missed 32 years ago.
With the fifty-fifty hindsight the film appears prescient, even prophetic, in its warning about the long-term affects of the Sexual Revolution. Since then we've seen countless dead in the AIDS pandemic, 40 million American babies (of all races) murdered legally in America beginning in 1973 (one year after Sally had her shed-a-tear-and-move-on abortion in this 1972 film), the growing acceptance of thuggery, and the unending encroachments on our civil liberties culminating in Shrub legalizing torture and SCOTUS making a mockery of habeus corpus, and the list could go on.
Great flick, I urge you to take a second look. I'd love to hear your comments.
Walter[/QUOTE]
I have seen 'Cabaret.'
I think it is important for newbie WNs to realize that the original Nazis [the brownshirts] were [B]reacting [/B] and not merely acting. From 1918 onward, communists made vigorous attempts to communize Germany. And - here is the kicker - they almost succeeded. That's right. Jews such as Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg came very close to making Germany a satellite of the Soviet Union.
My point? If the Nazis were thuggish, they were thuggish for a good reason.
2005-01-21 03:35 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]That's right. Jews such as Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg came very close to making Germany a satellite of the Soviet Union.
My point? If the Nazis were thuggish, they were thuggish for a good reason.
----------[/QUOTE]The brave protectors of the civilization of the Christian West against the godless barbaric Bolshevics? :lol:
Nazism was sort of exposed on that score - at least it lost a lot of its credibility. Remember, that's the same line that Bill Kristol and Co. use now.
You can't just judge a dog by its bark.
2005-01-21 05:21 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Okiereddust]The brave protectors of the civilization of the Christian West against the godless barbaric Bolshevics? :lol:
Nazism was sort of exposed on that score - at least it lost a lot of its credibility. Remember, that's the same line that Bill Kristol and Co. use now.
You can't just judge a dog by its bark.[/QUOTE]
Well, really, "Christian" had nothing to do with the matter in Nazi Germany. And, in my opinion, doesn't[I] per se[/I] re: the West. I mean, look at ancient Greece. It wasn't Christian. But it was White. But of course I am biased on the religion issue, because I am not religious anymore.
The Nazis were trying to keep Europe [I]White. [/I] That was the key nugget of the matter. That is what needs to be focused on. That is why the Nazis were important. They tried to prevent cultural bolshevism in Europe. [sarcasm] And now, just look at Europe today! Negroes in France! Pakistanis in Germany! A leftist paradise!
2005-01-21 06:28 | User Profile
[QUOTE=arkady]Thanks, Walter, for the detailed and thoughtful review.
My bottom line: Degenerate sex is certainly pervasive throughout the film, but nevertheless I can't agree that it's [I]about[/I] degenerate sex; the Seventies had no problem at all with whores and homosexuals. It's about what happens to a society that abandons all the things it has ever stood for and can only chant "If it feels good, do it!" as it sinks into the abyss.
Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
PS: "The Gorilla Song" is a scream. Try to imagine someone waltzing with Susan Sontag as it plays in the background.[/QUOTE]
Brilliant, arkady, simply brilliant.
I didn't know that Dr. Pierce liked this film. I guess I had mentally filed it away under "philo-Semitic" and didn't give it a second thought until I reviewed it this week.
I think that the film was saying that the sexual immorality and general moral morass of Weimar Germany stemmed from the materialism and nihilim ascendant at that time. Like I said, the central song Cabaret was an indictment of this same nihilistic materialism that was the root cause of Wiemar's moral rot.
The film suggests, in my humble opinion of course, that the antidote to the poison of nihilism is a return to traditional religion. This is perhaps the significance of the Jewish wedding scene in the synagogue. Fritz escapes the moral swamp by returning to his religion and marrying a Jewess.
This was the kosher heart of the film. The corruption was portrayed as an exclusively German thing that the young Jewish couple managed to break free from. The tragedy is their unspoken fate in the upcoming Holocaust.
So, I agree that this Hollywood film was intended to be profoundly philo-Semitic. However, it's probably one of those cases where a liberal artist shoots himself in the foot. For example, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and company made "Dead Man Walking", no doubt intending to raise public consciousness about the evils of the death penalty. But I left the theater with quite the opposite impression. For me, Dead Man Walking is one of the most powerful statements in favor of the death penalty I've ever seen. Likewise Cabaret, it seems to me, pays a similar backhanded compliment to traditional religion and morality, and even makes the egregious mistake of indentifying the Nazis with (at least attempted) moral regeneration.
I think that Ygg has an important insight on this, see his review of Clockwork Orange especially. We make a big mistake when we think Jews and others apprehend the world as we do. They experience the world with very different mental equipment, and so their internal world differs greatly from our own. That's clearly the case for blacks, whose internal experience nevertheless baffles me. But it's also true for Jews.
So, when the Jews hear Beethoven, they hear something joyous and uplifting yet safe, and are shocked - SHOCKED - to learn that Aryans like Little Alex instead see visions of liberating violence and glorious conquest. Ygg makes the point that before Clockwork Orange, the Jewish educational establishment thought that an education in the "classics" was a good thing, as it "tamed" these dangerous Aryans, uplifting them and rendering them harmless, the same effect it had on them. But Kubrick showed them that this isn't the case, and indeed the Jewish educational establishment sharply changed course about that time and began an all-fronts assault on the classics of Western culture. Conversely, Little Alex heard a show tune, and instead of wanting to perform a harmless tapdance like Gene Kelly as the kosher producers no doubt assumed, he wanted to kick a man to death. Kubrick was saying that's the way we are, that our internal apprehension of the world is simply that way, and Jews like the brainwasher Brodsky in the film had better deal with that fact of Aryan nature.
So, I think it's not terribly surprising that kosher Hollywood should come up with a film that Jews took as philo-Semitic, not even imagining that Aryans would experience it as something very different. This mental blindspot - thinking that the rest of the world thinks like them - is their great weakness. Of course, it's really our great weakness, too.
Take blacks (please! ba-dup-bup!!). How do you suppose they experience the world? What is their internal world like? This question was always a source of wonder for me. All I can say for sure is that their internal world must be very different from our own. We get hints of it from some of the things they say, like the "little me in the big me" in describing their religious feelings. WHAT IN THE WORLD DOES THAT MEAN??? Whatever it is, we'll never really get that. Also, the way their bodies move. Jazz and other types of African music and their bodiliy movements are somehow connected, but I'll never really understand that, either. I suspect it's connected with how they experience time, which differs fundamentally from our own experiece. It seems to me that their internal experience is much more in the NOW than is ours, much more attuned (if that's the right word) to a continuous flow of sensory input that is experienced spontaneously but not really filtered through the conscious mind. Somehow. The point is that it bespeaks a very different mental complex.
I'm starting to babble, so I'll shut up.
Thanks again for your insightful comments.
Walter
2005-01-21 06:33 | User Profile
Arkady:
What did you think of All That Jazz?
I've come to really appreciate it. There's nothing terribly political there. It's about death, in particular Bob Fosse imagining his own death. But it was a beautiful film visually. The song and dance numbers were great. I liked the music, too.
Walter
2005-01-21 07:20 | User Profile
[QUOTE]The Nazis were trying to keep Europe White. That was the key nugget of the matter. [/QUOTE]
That simply isn't true.
The Nazis were all about the rule of Germany over other peoples. The Nazis were all about "Germany, Germany over all, over all in the world."
They weren't trying to keep Europe white so much as they were trying to establish German hegemony there.
2005-01-21 12:55 | User Profile
Hitler was also ready to sell Australia and New Zealand to the Japanese, and also hand over Siberia to them while Germans would control all formerly Russian territories west of Ural mountains.
Petr
2005-01-21 14:11 | User Profile
I didn't know that Dr. Pierce liked this film. I guess I had mentally filed it away under "philo-Semitic" and didn't give it a second thought until I reviewed it this week.
He mentions it in one of his [I]American Dissident Voices[/I] broadcasts: [url]http://www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs0202c.html[/url]
What did you think of All That Jazz?
I've come to really appreciate it. There's nothing terribly political there. It's about death, in particular Bob Fosse imagining his own death. But it was a beautiful film visually. The song and dance numbers were great. I liked the music, too.
I've never seen all of it. Watching Roy Scheider stumbling around the hospital smearing the walls with his blood isn't what I look for in a musical. My wife and I left after about half an hour, making it one of the only two films I've ever walked out on.
That was during the film's theatrical release. Possibly I'd feel differently today, but I haven't been motivated to take a second look.
2005-01-21 14:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=arkady]He mentions it in one of his [I]American Dissident Voices[/I] broadcasts: [url]http://www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs0202c.html[/url]
I've never seen all of it. Watching Roy Scheider stumbling around the hospital smearing the walls with his blood isn't what I look for in a musical. My wife and I left after about half an hour, making it one of the only two films I've ever walked out on.
That was during the film's theatrical release. Possibly I'd feel differently today, but I haven't been motivated to take a second look.[/QUOTE]
I know what you mean. I nearly walked out of it when I first saw it, too.
It's just that I've come to appreciate the choreography much more. It's marvelous. I had a friend who was into all that stuff in a big way. She'd performed with a couple of the big name dance troupes even. She clued me on on how good some of those numbers were.
2005-01-21 18:18 | User Profile
[B][I] - "For example, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and company made "Dead Man Walking", no doubt intending to raise public consciousness about the evils of the death penalty. But I left the theater with quite the opposite impression. For me, Dead Man Walking is one of the most powerful statements in favor of the death penalty I've ever seen." [/I] [/B]
Interesting. I haven't seen that film - would you care to elaborate on that one too? You clearly have talent in the movie analysis!
Petr
2005-01-21 20:01 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][B][I] - "For example, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and company made "Dead Man Walking", no doubt intending to raise public consciousness about the evils of the death penalty. But I left the theater with quite the opposite impression. For me, Dead Man Walking is one of the most powerful statements in favor of the death penalty I've ever seen." [/I] [/B]
Interesting. I haven't seen that film - would you care to elaborate on that one too? You clearly have talent in the movie analysis!
Petr[/QUOTE]
It's been a while since I've seen it.
Basically, there is this scumbag played by Sean Penn who murdered, with another scumbag accomplice, a couple of kids who were necking in some lovers' lane after their Prom. Raped the girl while they forced the boy to watch, and then shot them both in a muddy woods while they begged for their lives. Very grim. The flashback to that scene left me no sympathy whatever for the Sean Penn character.
Susan Sarandon plays a nun (based on a real person, named Prejean from Louisiana, if I recall correctly) who accepts the Sean Penn character as her spiritual charge. She's terribly against the death penalty, a real crusader. Also, she's a very modernist nun, doesn't wear her habit, is shown in a very stereotypical way as standing up bravely to the stodgy male hierarchy. Similarly, the prison warden is part of the stereotypical oppressive patriarchy. Both the male Catholic hierarchy and the prison warden insist on objective standards, following rules and procedures, seeing reasons behind all of it. Sister Perjean is too hip for all that. She wants everybody to be nice. To place self-indulgent feelings before reason.
Sean Penn resists real repentance, and mouths some Jesus-loves-me-this-I-know act. But as his chances for a reprieve fall away one at a time, he starts to take a colder look at himself. He starts to accept his responsibility for the horrible thing he did. He finally confesses to Sister Prejean, just moments before his execution. He weeps in genuine sorrow. As he is wheeled on his gurney into the execution hall, he says to the families who are gathered there that he's sorry, but that he believes the death penalty is wrong. His moral objections to the death penalty after all that fall flat, at least to me. It seemed completely out of place to me. Anyway, the parents are unmoved by that. The guards administer the lethal injection. As he dies the ghosts of the murdered kids appear in their Prom outfits.
Justice is served.
There is terrible catharsis here. The moral scales of the universe are righted. A terrible sinner repents and accepts responsiblity for his actions. His soul is saved. The ghosts of the outraged victims were given rest. The parents of the kids, who were until that time emotionally and morally paralyzed from the trauma, found that they could pray again, and clearly were shown as the film ended as having discovered the strength to move on with the rest of their lives.
It's all good. I fail to see what the audience is supposed to feel moral outrage about. Killing Sean Penn lead to very, very healthy results.
The conclusion seems inescapable to me. None of that good stuff would have happened had the male patriarchy not insisted on all those objective standards, on the rule of law, on following proper procedures.
To illustrate, one small moment involved Sister Prejean arguing with the warden as to not allowing Sean Penn to listen to music. The warden points out that music excites emotions, and it's just not fitting with the gravity of death row. But because of that, Sean Penn is forced not to wallow in emotion but rather to take a cold, hard look at himself. Had the warden buckled under Sister Prejean's overweening and self-congratulatory do-gooder act, it's entirely possible Sean Penn would not have repented, and his soul would have been lost.
I'll watch the film again. I suggest that you watch it, and tell me what you think.
2005-01-22 03:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]That simply isn't true.
The Nazis were all about the rule of Germany over other peoples. The Nazis were all about "Germany, Germany over all, over all in the world."
They weren't trying to keep Europe white so much as they were trying to establish German hegemony there.[/QUOTE]
Sure, the Nazis wanted to create a new Roman Empire [partly, at least, but not to the degree that their critics charge]. But included in that desire was the desire to keep Europe White and Jew-free.
Are you a knee-jerk anti-Nazi, Walter? :biggrin:
[edited]
2005-01-22 07:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]Sure, the Nazis wanted to create a new Roman Empire [partly, at least, but not to the degree that their critics charge]. But included in that desire was the desire to keep Europe White and Jew-free.
Are you a knee-jerk anti-Nazi, Walter? :biggrin:
[edited]
-----[/QUOTE]
There is nothing knee jerk about my anti-Nazism.
2005-01-22 10:58 | User Profile
Nazis also intended eventually to drive Slavs to the other side of the Ural mountains, turn them into illiterate helots and sometimes simply starve them to death.
Today's Poles and Russians wouldn't be around here today to enjoy this Jew-free Europe.
Also, there are also hints in the Table Talks that Hitler envisioned this new German empire finally going to war against the United States as well. He thought that he might not be alive himself to see it happening, but he seemed to think this conflict to inevitable anyways.
According to an avid Hitler-defender Zvaci:
[COLOR=DarkRed][B]"Hitler already had the prototype of the intercontinental bomber Messerschmitt 'New York' (Me 264), designed to drop the carriage across the ocean."[/B][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.thephora.org/forum/showthread.php?t=5039&page=3&pp=10&highlight=messerschmitt[/url]
Petr
2005-01-22 20:54 | User Profile
Certainly "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is the most powerful scene in the movie--made more so by its effective staging.
The boy's sweet tenor rises over the square and interrupts the conversation between Brian and the Baron--the camera then focuses on the face of the blond boy (who is, to the film viewer, ostensibly singing an apolitical folk song)...as his singing becomes more energetic the camera tilts downwards, revealing the neckerchief; tunic and armband of the Hitler Youth. (Stunning moment!)
The good villagers then rise in a mass to join in singing the openly political refrain--hoisting their arms in the Roman salute...this scene is then witnessed by Brian and the Baron in diminishing longshot--through the rear window of the Baron's speedily departing limousine. "You still think you can control them?", asks Brian.
---The "Money Song" might well be the anthem of Bush Junior's deracinated Plutocracy.
2005-01-23 15:18 | User Profile
CABARET and ALL THAT JAZZ were two-thirds of Bob Fosse's 70s troika (hardly anybody mentions the middle spoke, LENNY, these days). Clearly the man was a gifted moviemaker, really the first since Vincent Minnelli to have shown more aptitude for film than the musical theater he emerged from.
Of course, Fosse had an important, if uncredited, collaborator: the era of the 1970s, which - irony of ironies - both closely resembled Weimar-era decadence and yet provided the cultural atmosphere in which a CABARET or a GODFATHER or a TAXI DRIVER might get funded, finished and released without bowdlerization or pulled punches in the first place. Hard to even imagine films like that being bankrolled by the majors - not before then, and certainly not since.
It's also interesting that Joel Grey is always (rightly) cited for his 'character' (who has no dialogue, and about whom the audience knows no more at the end credits than they did at the beginning of the picture).
While I liked CABARET, I tend to take things which interpret Naziism through Weimar-colored glasses ...and vice versa... with a grain of salt. To be frank, what I liked best about it was the ingenuity, and the commitment to detail, with which the era was evoked. By commitment to detail I don't mean just getting the haircuts and the cars and the furniture right (though all of that is certainly important) but the language, the attitudes, the popular prejudices and sacred/profane icons; the gestalt of a particular time in a particular place.
In other words, there are no black best buddies, no saintly prophetic Jews who know what's coming, no grafting of modernity and its 20-20 hindsight onto the production. I also liked the brassy, extreme close-ups and rapid editing of the musical numbers juxtaposed with the calm, almost serene composition of the 'Sally Bowles' backstory - it's always a pleasure to watch a movie that has the confidence to tell its story in medium and long-shot instead of the wearying reliance upon varyuing degrees of close-ups (especially in period films, where close-ups hide a multitude of sins by the art department).
Thought ALL THAT JAZZ was a good one, too, albeit a little grisly. Love the scene where Fosse/Scheider's soon-to-be-ex-wife harangues him about his one-night stands and yells, "What about that brunette in Philly? She didn't even have a [I]name[/I]!", and Scheider snarls back: "Let me tell you something! She [I]had [/I] a name, ok? [B]Her name was 'sweetheart'!![/B]"
2005-01-23 17:56 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]CABARET and ALL THAT JAZZ were two-thirds of Bob Fosse's 70s troika (hardly anybody mentions the middle spoke, LENNY, these days). Clearly the man was a gifted moviemaker, really the first since Vincent Minnelli to have shown more aptitude for film than the musical theater he emerged from. [/B]"[/QUOTE]
Great stuff, Spiderman.
Fosse really knew how to filma song and dance number.
The more I think about the song Cabaret, the more I'm struck dumb by the way the lyrics lay bare the philosophical problem in a few lines. The music accents it beautifully, and Fosse's filming of it is brilliant beyond compare.
Did Joel Grey ever do anything much after that? I remember when I was living in NYC in the late 80's that he got top billing in a remake of Cabaret on Broadway. From the biography I linked to above it looks like EmCee was the beginning and end of his career. Interesting that he's the father of the actress who co-starreed opposite Patrick Swazie (sp?) in Dirty Dancing, the Jewish American Princess wish-fulfillment classic.
2005-01-23 18:16 | User Profile
[B][I] - "Interesting that he's the father of the actress who co-starreed opposite Patrick Swazie (sp?) in Dirty Dancing, the Jewish American Princess wish-fulfillment classic."[/I][/B]
Do you mean that to marry a handsome goy "from the other side of the tracks" is the wish-fulfillment of JAPs?
Petr
2005-01-23 18:47 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Did Joel Grey ever do anything much after that?[/QUOTE]
Not much that there's a record of: his favored medium was the theater, so I'd guess he stuck with the girl that brung him. He didn't go the tv-guest-star route, playing celebrity killers on COLUMBO and the like, but he did take a page out of William Shatner's book and recorded at least one wildly-inappropriate cover of a rock classic, Cream's "White Room". (If you've ever heard Shatner's show-stopping version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", you'll instantly realize the comedic potential. "White Room" is kinda like that.)
In fact the only other two movies I've seen him in were MAN ON A SWING, which he did after CABARET, playing a psychic assisting the police in a serial-murder case; and REMO WILLIAMS, in heavy make-up, playing Fred Ward's aged Korean mentor. Beyond that, nada.
2005-01-24 07:01 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr][B][I] - "Interesting that he's the father of the actress who co-starreed opposite Patrick Swazie (sp?) in Dirty Dancing, the Jewish American Princess wish-fulfillment classic."[/I][/B]
Do you mean that to marry a handsome goy "from the other side of the tracks" is the wish-fulfillment of JAPs?
Petr[/QUOTE]
Absolutely.
Compare the handsome young Patrick to whatever Norman or Murray she's probably going to get stuck with, and the odds are pretty good she'll long for the forbidden fruit.
2005-01-24 14:24 | User Profile
After reading this thread last week, I was able to get the Cabaret DVD from my local library. Had never seen the whole film, but I was looking forward to viewing it with great anticipation.
Besides the theme of the film, what really struck me is the quality of the film making itself. A real masterpiece by Fosse and excellent acting by the cast. I think real quality film making and film makers are rare things these days.
The tune that says it all is the one sung by the Nazi Youth, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" (say that Wiemar Germany is not for Germans). As he sings on the stage in the beer garden, the whole crowd gets to it's feet and joins in the singing, except one old man who looks skeptically on them. When the Nazi Youth salutes the crowd, you realize that the horrors to come was more an extreme reaction to an very extreme degradation, pollution and dissolution of a 1000 year old culture by people who cared less about culture and race and only cared about money ("Money Makes The World Go Round") and sex ("Two Girls") and entertainment ("Cabaret").
Real eye-opening film. Definitely frightening parallels between Wiemar Germany and 2005 America.
2005-01-25 16:46 | User Profile
Walter,
Our mutual aqaintance "Paul Westerfield" of the defunct SFOF inspired me to rent this movie. It is well made and it filled me with total disgust save one scene. You have three guesses and the first two don't count.
You're correct. They [u]did[/u] shoot themselves in the feet with the country tavern scene. Leni Riefenstahl couldn't have done it any better. I have to admit that was the only part I liked and found quite uplifting. I don't think that was the director's intention. The rest of the film was dismal.