Cabaret Blu-ray (DigiBook)

Cabaret

(1972)

A female entertainer at the Kit Kat Club of Weimar-era Berlin falls in and out of love with a visiting British scholar while the Nazi Party rises to power around them.

For more about Cabaret and the Cabaret Blu-ray release, see Cabaret Blu-ray Review published by Michael Reuben on January 25, 2013 where this Blu-ray release scored 4.5 out of 5.

Director: Bob Fosse
Writers: Jay Presson Allen

, Joe Masteroff, John Van Druten, Christopher Isherwood
Starring: Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey, Fritz Wepper, Marisa Berenson
Producer: Cy Feuer

» See full cast & crew

Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray presentation of Geoffrey Unsworth's Oscar-winning cinematography for Cabaret is already drawing criticism for being "soft" and lacking in detail. At the risk of offending some posters, I'm simply going to declare at the outset that these criticisms are just wrong. This is a detailed image, as becomes immediately evident when one examines such well-lit scenes as the language lessons that Brian conducts in Sally's room, or Natalia Landauer's living room when Sally visits her, or the bedroom in Maximilian's castle where he tells Brian that blue is "his" color.

Now, of course, when the environment is darker and the light is diffused by smoke, as is usually the case in the Kit Kat Klub, there is less detail on display and deliberately so. The principal artistic effect in such scenes is determined by strong contrasting colors, which the Blu-ray reproduces admirably, as well as by appropriately delineated shades of black, which the Blu-ray also reproduces accurately, showing figures in the dimly lit recesses of the club with just enough detail to create the desired effect. Perhaps the most painterly of Unsworth's compositions can be seen in the extended sequence at Maximilian's castle, where he, Sally and Brian drunkenly dance through the night, in a huge hall marked by pools of light and shadow. Here again, the issue is not whether one sees every hair follicle or furniture edge; it's whether one senses the unfamiliarity of the shadowy territory into which Sally and Brian have entered, now that they're in Maximilian's realm.

The Blu-ray of Cabaret has a natural but unobtrusive grain structure and is free from obvious artifacts of any kind, whether through grain reduction, high frequency filtering, artificial sharpening or other manipulation. (Compression artifacts are also not an issue.) This ranks with the very best of the film-like transfers I have seen. That it should be criticized for "softness" is yet one more indication that Blu-ray viewers are beginning to lose any sense for the look of film in an era when digital acquisition and projection have changed the way cinema is perceived. Today, even those projects originally shot on film are immediately scanned, processed on digital intermediates (so that, in most cases, all trace of their celluloid origin is removed) and output to DCP ("digital cinema package") for theatrical distribution. Cabaret comes from an era when everything was analog, including shooting, editing, color timing and projection. That's how the Blu-ray presents it, and that's how it should look. I have scored the video accordingly.

According to IMDb, Cabaret was originally released in "4-track stereo", which is the process that Fox introduced with its first Cinemascope epic The Robe and remained in use sporadically into the Eighties. This mix would have consisted of left, right, center and surround, and was presumably the basis for the 5.1 mix presented on the 1998 and 2006 DVDs and the Blu-ray's lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix.

The Blu-ray's track sounds terrific. The singer's voices (primarily Grey and Minnelli) are strong and clear, and the musical accompaniment strikes just the right balance between a raucous club band and an orchestral accompaniment. The dialogue in the non-musical scenes, which are the bulk of the film, is always clear and natural-sounding, and the sound effects, which often had to be woven carefully with the musical accompaniment, register with appropriate impact (another of the film's Oscars: best sound). The surround channel is used primarily to give the music an added presence for a few big effects like the trains passing overhead that Sally likes to use as cover for her version of "primal scream" therapy.

Cabaret: Other Editions

Blu-ray 1-disc $19.99

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