Word: minnelli
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cabaret with Liza Minnelli. Gary Theatre...
Cabaret with Liza Minnelli. Gary Theatre...
...worst hangovers") and always looking for that one lay which will bring her fortune and fame. Sally is a desperate character whose high spirits are the only assurance she has that she can keep from being a loser. Given half a chance, I suspect that Miss Minnelli might have had the range for such a part--but that half a chance isn't given her. Instead she is forced into another replay of the kooky Pookie Adams she played in The Sterile Cuckoo--a spirited, imaginative unhappy little girl who's never recovered from the debilitating effects of an unloving...
...very sad. One suspects that the chief reason Miss Minnelli is asked, and consents, to play her role is that she lacks conventional beauty. On screen, she is continually apologizing for her appearance, asking "Doesn't my body drive you wild?" in self-deprecating good spirits, and mugging incessantly as if she thinks she is any the more attractive in a state of perpetual motion. Miss Minnelli is simply another victim of a double standard that remains anachronistically true of today's movies: while actors who aren't conventionally handsome--Alan Arkin. Dustin Hoffman. Eliot Gould--are permitted to admit...
...really Fosse's supple use of editing that holds the film together though. Its best moment, in my mind, occurs as Minnelli and York kiss and begin to make love while the camera threatens to fade into the phoney discreteness of a rain-soaked window. Suddenly, the rain becomes the smokey white light of the cabaret and Miss Minnelli's head returns to view as she begins to sing "Maybe This Time," a lovely Judy Garland type song that meshes perfectly with the previous scene. In achieving a balanced counterpoint between movie "reality" and movie "artifice," Cabaret saves itself from...