Intoxicating mix of decadence and horror

CABARET (★★★★★) is 50 years old, a darkly thrilling jubilee well worth marking with today’s triumphant re-release to the big screen.

It’s hard to overstate both its brilliance and its shockingness at the time: eight Oscars were won by a musical set in 1931, the last throes of the German Weimar Republic, as the currency collapsed and the Nazi Party grew strong.

Based on a stage musical (with music by Kander and Ebb) which, in turn, echoed Christopher Isherwood’s semiautobiographical novel Goodbye To Berlin, the film is decadently gorgeous and musically unforgettable. At its heart is both the breathtaking cabaret nerve of Liza Minnelli and the diabolic, unnerving presence of Joel Grey as the Kit Kat Club’s MC (both pictured right).

It was rated PG, but in story and songs it covers bisexuality, abortion, a threesome, brutality and savage Nazi anti-Semitism. One of the most striking and shocking scenes in cinema is a moment in the Biergarten in an idyllic village. A handsome Aryan boy sings Tomorrow Belongs To Me, the mood moving from pastoral peace to horror as the camera shows the swastika on his arm and faces in the crowd enchanted or alarmed.

One old man, maybe Jewish, lowers his head in dark awareness of what is to come. It is still the most gut-wrenching evocation of the populist power of fascism. In the Kit Kat Club, songs such Mein Herr, Money and If You Could See Her drip cynicism and worse as a blind-in-one-eye audience laughs in Europe’s last-chance saloon. Bob Fosse — director and starkly original choreographer — perfectly balances seriousness, heartbreak, eroticism and entertainment.

ANOTHER creative partnership is filmed with equal honesty, though more lugubrious in tone. Andrew Dominik records Nick Cave’s work with Warren Ellis on the singer’s last two albums, Ghosteen and Carnage, in This Much I Know To Be True (★★★✩✩).

There are reflections on Cave’s themes of love and mortality.

His songs are about longing, ambiguity, death, violence and deep spiritual searching. As he sings, the pair work on arrangements with other musicians.

Hearing him and seeing him work so intensely is both slightly absurd in its funereal sincerity and, when you surrender to it, wrenchingly moving.

For his fans, the film will be an immense treat. But others will also get a real sense of meeting a fascinating artist with a unique vision. And, importantly, appreciating the fearless emotional openness of an artistic friendship.

This Much i Know To Be True will be shown in cinemas for one night only on May 11. Cabaret is in cinemas from today.