A few months ago I attended a private screening in Pasadena of the 1972 film Cabaret, which lost the Academy Award for Best Film to The Godfather, and yet still put an Oscar on the mantel of director Bob Fosse, not to mention ones for Liza Minnelli, Joel Gray, and five others. The screening was hosted by film buff Alex Kozinski, whose day job is chief justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and whose parents are both Holocaust survivors. His friend, Cabaret producer Manny Wolf, was on hand to treat us with cinematic anecdotes and to answer questions afterward.
The first time I saw Cabaret I was too young to really appreciate the dark undercurrent of the story’s historical context. In the film, based on Christopher Isherwood’s book The Berlin Stories, the performers and patrons of a 1930s Berlin nightclub indulge in a raucous, desperately carefree decadence against the ominous backdrop of a growing National Socialist Party presence and increasing hostility directed at Jews.
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