Category: Liza Minelli

ARTHUR

By Marc S. Sanders

I would love to be friends with Arthur Bach. Sure I’d be wined and dined, living a lifestyle where money is no object, toy trains are at my disposal, and drinks on a serving platter are brought to me constantly. Arthur has got it all. Well, not all of it. He’s never been in love. He hates his cold hearted father and he only has one friend, his dependable butler, Hobson.

Dudley Moore’s greatest role is Arthur from 1981. The best protagonists in comedy are the ones who go against the order. Arthur is a spoiled kid in an adult’s body. He lives to smile and laugh and drink and play and drink some more and more. It’s easy when you are sitting on three quarters of a billion-dollar fortune. Imagine though if you could lose all of that money. The only way to hold on to wealth is to marry a woman named Susan (Jill Eikenberry) that you are not in love with, simply to merge two wealthy families together for even more industrial power. Arthur is made to be a pawn by his own unloving father, as well as Susan’s ruthless father (Stephen Elliott) who is proud to share how he killed a man when he was eleven years old. No matter. Arthur will just marry Susan and cheat on her, as his elderly grandmother Martha (Geraldine Fitzgerald) suggests.

All seems easy until Arthur becomes over the moon in love with a woman named Linda (Liza Minnelli) who is caught shoplifting a tie in Bergdorf’s in New York City. Arthur can’t stop thinking about Linda but the family would never approve. Linda is a waitress dreaming to become an actress, but lives a poor life with her unemployed father (Barney Martin).

Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli have one of the best on screen chemistries ever in film. They look like they belong with one another, and their timing is perfectly solid. When they share moments together their on-screen laughter shows up naturally and intermittently. I imagine no matter how many times they rehearsed their scenes together it was never the same way twice.

As an individual performance, Moore works like a great stand up comic having the best show of his life. His drunkenness is hilarious with his slurs and infectious non stop giggles and outrageously loud laughter. He gives The Joker a run for his money in the laughter department.

Early on, he escorts a prostitute to dinner at The Plaza Hotel and his interactions with family members and those of the wealthy social circle are a great contrast in comedy. Throughout the film, Dudley Moore will use every prop he can get his hand on to make his inebriated state all the more funny from simply a telephone to a mounted moose head. Moore is also a helluva piano player.

The most special relationship though is Arthur’s connection to Hobson (beautifully played with blue blood dryness by Sir John Gielgud). A man like Hobson is not one you’d expect to associate with a man as immature and childish as Arthur, but you find a nurturing dimension to Hobson’s character. He’s Arthur’s surrogate father. He teaches Arthur to be practical about his good fortune. At the same time, he doesn’t dismiss Arthur’s happiness. Gielgud is at times surprising and positively touching. He also has some of the best lines in the film. After agreeing to run Arthur’s bath, he retorts with “Perhaps you’d like me to come in there and wash your dick for you, you little shit!” His impression of Linda: “Normally one would have to go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature.”

As Hobson becomes ill, so must Arthur finally learn to grow up. The moment I lost my mother eight years ago, the very first thing that occurred to me was that I am no longer a child. I actually got my first grey hairs immediately after mom unexpectedly passed. No longer was there the protective guidance to make decisions and therefore as Hobson continues to deteriorate, Arthur becomes aware of tough decisions he must make regarding sobriety, wealth and most importantly love. With Hobson by his side, Arthur Bach is a beautiful character arc of comedy and sadness. As a kid growing up in the ‘80s, Arthur Bach was one of the first to demonstrate the change in a character’s arc for me. I really started to recognize depth and dimension; different angles and perspectives that a well written character faces.

The film is over 40 years old, but still has its magic to make you laugh and cry. Arthur is just an enormously touching comedy.

CABARET

By Marc S. Sanders

Is it possible for a musical to be disturbing? Maybe Bob Fosse’s Cabaret favors that argument.

Liza Minnelli won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1972 for her portrayal of Sally Bowles, a carefree, happy go lucky performer at the underground Kit Kat Club located in Berlin, 1931. She is the lead attraction among a company of dancers doing a different kind of stage vaudeville with its colorful emcee played amazingly by Joel Grey, also an Oscar winner.

The musical numbers are outlandish with caked on makeup and outfits that could make Victoria’s Secret seem like a children’s shop. I gathered from the film that Fosse, who choreographed the numbers as well, offered up the escape of life first, before showing the harsh reality of Berlin in its historical context.

Sally and the Emcee’s performances are first on hand, depicted as silly and showstopping. Thereafter, Sally encounters an English gentleman named Brian Roberts (Michael York) who is a professor of English study attempting to complete his doctorate. As Sally and Brian become closer as friends first, he must reluctantly admit to Sally that he’s a better bed companion with a man than with a woman. Sally doesn’t understand why he didn’t say that in the first place as she attempts to come on to him.

Herein lies the dilemma many faced as the Nazi party was gaining traction in Germany. How necessary is it to hide your true natures to preserve your life? Sally’s underground lifestyle at the club clouds her vision of what’s gradually happening in the world. Nevertheless, they eventually develop a relationship as Brian appears to be bisexual, more specifically.

A side story concerns Brian & Sally’s relationship with a baron named Maximillan (Helmut Griem), who will wine and dine them at his estate only to later abandon the respective relationships he sets up with them to more or less make them feel as cheap as prostitutes. I wasn’t sure what to gather from this extension, however. The irony is that unbeknownst to Sally and Brian they have both been sleeping with Max. Eventually, Sally reveals she’s pregnant but does not know who the father may be, Brian or Max, and an abortion is considered.

An additional side story concerns a wealthy Jewish German heiress named Natalia who falls in love with a German Jew named Fritz living under the guise of a Protestant.

Cabaret is a loose adaptation of The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood (the Brian character) and his experience with stage performer Jean Ross (the Sally character). Isherwood’s stories gradually formed into different iterations of stage plays and short stories before making it to Broadway and Fosse’s celebrated film.

Though Fosse apparently took some questionable liberties and departures from Isherwood’s writings, I think it depicts the personal struggles of love and self identity while the world around them is quickly changing into a scary reality where your own self identity could get you killed.

Fosse gives terrifying glimpses of how the Nazi party seeps it’s way into a decadent Berlin of underground showmanship. Though apparently Berlin really wasn’t so decadent as the film has you believe. Ross and Isherwood have gone on record describing Berlin was a more destitute and poor environment, actually.

In Fosse’s film, a Nazi youth is seen early on being kicked out of the Kit Kat Club. A few minutes later, the night club manager is being beaten in an alley. Fosse juxtaposes scary moments like this against the silly debauchery depicted on stage. It’s as if the Gypsies, homosexuals and Jews in the area are unaware of the evil practice that is gradually taking over outside.

Soon, Fosse makes the swastika more apparent in the streets with propaganda handouts. Most telling is when a young boy is seen at an outdoor beer garden gathering singing a number selfishly entitled “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” Fosse is frighteningly effective at showing this boy from the neck up. Eventually, he moves the camera down to reveal the boy’s swastika wrapped around his sleeve. The song which seemed to champion beauty and nature now evolves into a march of grandstanding fascism. It completely shocked me. Just as people like Brian and Fritz are reluctant to reveal their backgrounds, both sexually and religiously, the Nazi party is proud to announce their mindset in a converse manner. By the end of the film, the audience at the Kit Kat Club more predominantly shows Nazis in the audience as opposed to just the one shown in the beginning of the film. Hatred has spread its disease.

While Minnelli shines in her role, her showstopping moment really comes at the end when she dangles her carefree attitude while belting out the title song with “Life Is A Cabaret.” Along with Joel Grey’s Emcee closing out the film with the “Finale,” this musical goes against the grain of most musicals’ cheerful close outs or romantic theatrics. Fosse’s mirror image of the Nazi party taking in Sally and Emcee’s performances are chilling. We sense the characters’ time is at an end and wisely the film runs its closing credits among frightening silence with the cold, blurred images of Nazi soldiers staring right at us.

I had never seen the film of Cabaret until now, but I had attended two different stage productions; neither of which I liked. Bob Fosse’s film seems more clear with its content than I ever got from a stage performance. Perhaps it is because the Oscar winning art direction is more apparent than a stage set. We can see the bustling of Berlin change amid a political climate that at first is not taken so seriously. As hurtful and harrowing the relationships of love between Brian with Sally and then with Max, as well as Fritz and Natasha are, none of this will eventually compare to the upcoming demise for Berlin.

As Miguel noted in our recent podcast that focused on musicals, Cabaret won the most Oscars without winning Best Picture (losing to The Godfather). It’s clear how deserving it was of its accolades. The musical numbers are very engaging but the fear of fascism is well developed too. So there is a roller coaster of emotions to absorb from Fosse’s film. I believe in that podcast I noted that Francis Ford Coppola won Best Director. I now realize I was wrong. It was in fact Bob Fosse who took home that prize, and it’s truly evident how deserving that honor was for him.

Again, while I’ve yet to find a stage production I’ve liked, I was terribly moved by the film. Cabaret, the film from 1972, is a sensational and frightening production.