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The Liza Minnelli musical gets the full razzle-dazzle treatment on Blu-ray....
Warner / 124 Minutes / 1972 / Rated PG / Street Date: February 5, 2013
Cabaret is a bawdy, lusty, breathless musical, one that is not particularly explicit, but always keeps a feeling of sexual desire at its base. It may be pre-WWII Berlin – 1931 – but what is so immediate about Cabaret is how present it feels, even forty years after it was made: there are some elements of its production value that point to its age, but this new Blu-ray edition makes it feel like Cabaret is happening for the first time in front of our very eyes.
In fact, this is one of the more accomplished catalog high-def upgrades to have come down the pipe in the last few months. We recognize Joel Grey as our waifish emcee, we remember how glamorous and iconic Liza Minnelli truly was in her role as Sally Bowles, but this Cabaret Blu-ray is mesmerizing proof to the power of Blu-ray. On DVD, the movie was fun, but for fair-weather fans, never more than passable; on this new version, it pops right off the screen.
It still is befuddling that Oscar chose Bob Fosse as Best Director over Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather in 1972 (I bet they’d reverse that if they could), but even the Corleone saga’s first installment was that year’s most celebrated film, Cabaret brought home eight Academy Awards on Oscar night for a reason. With craftsmanlike precision and wondrous attention to detail, Fosse’s film remains a flighty, sexy treat of a movie, and there’s no question that it hasn’t looked or sounded this great in four decades.