Cabaret is ultimately pretty weak schnapps. It takes the Berlin of the 1930's—the Berlin of George Grosz cartoons and Christopher Isherwood stories (on which the film was based …)—and turns it into a backdrop for a musical…. An audience today could get pimples from a story like Fritz' and Natalya's, so the sugar loaf has to be sourdoughed with Nazism the way it is in Cabaret—or leavened with a few pogroms the way it is in Fiddler on the Roof. The Czar and Hitler play approximately the same role in these musicals that leukemia plays in Love Story.

The film's heroine, Sally Bowles, is a lot like Fritz. She too is saved from herself by her own ineptness and endeared to us. She wants passionately to be a femme fatale, "a most strange and exceptional person," as she herself often puts it. But she is hopelessly...