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Fritz Wepper, the German actor who portrayed the German Jew Fritz Wendel in Bob Fosse’s Oscar-winning musical masterpiece Cabaret and starred in his home country on the TV series Derrick and For Heaven’s Sake, has died. He was 82.

Wepper died Monday in a Munich hospice after a long illness that followed the life-threatening sepsis he suffered last year, his family announced.

An actor since childhood, Wepper landed the biggest international role of his career in Cabaret (1972), where he appeared alongside Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem and Joel Grey. As Wendel, he passed as a Protestant and fell in love with wealthy Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson).

After the film’s success — it raked in eight Oscars in 1973 — Wepper turned down Hollywood offers and instead took a sidekick role as Harry Klein on the new German crime series Derrick, playing alongside Horst Tappert‘s titular homicide detective, a...

Minnelli brings the razzle dazzle to a Berlin determined to ignore the gathering storm in this cinematic masterpiece

‘Still think you can control them?” Dizzied by their divinely decadent menage à trois in Weimar Berlin, cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), shy scholar Brian Roberts (Michael York) and suave aristocrat Baron von Heune (Helmut Griem) linger in a beer garden to watch a creepy blond boy singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me with the entire crowd ecstatically joining in – a satanically catchy and authentic-sounding Nazi marching song, brilliantly pastiched by Cabaret’s writer and composer, John Kander and Fred Ebb. It is a sensational moment in this addictive movie, based on the stage show Cabaret and Christopher Isherwood’s original stories about prewar Berlin, uniquely choreographed and directed by Bob Fosse and rereleased now for its 50th anniversary.

Maybe its views on gender fluidity and consent are confrontationally tactless in 2022 compared...

Sex and swastikas! — that combo shows up in both trash cinema and high art. Luchino Visconti’s searing look at Nazi corruption sees an industrialist family torn apart by murderous greed and ambition worthy of the Borgias. The fiendish Countess Ingrid Thulin has raised a twisted son (Helmut Berger) to serve her deadly schemes; her path to power involves framing one heir for a killing while another rival is sacrificed in an SS massacre for the good of the Reich. The chilling treachery plays out at family dinner tables, in the offices of a steel mill, and in various bedrooms; Nazi fervor is equated with sex perversion. The uncut original version, remastered, also stars Dirk Bogarde, Helmut Griem, Renaud Verley, Umberto Orsini, René Koldehoff, Charlotte Rampling and Florinda Bolkan.

The Damned

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 1098

1969 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 157 min. / La caduta degli dei, Götterdämmerung / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 28, 2021 / 39.95

Starring: Dirk Bogarde,...

(See previous post: “Gay Pride Movie Series Comes to a Close: From Heterosexual Angst to Indonesian Coup.”) Ken Russell's Valentino (1977) is notable for starring ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as silent era icon Rudolph Valentino, whose sexual orientation, despite countless gay rumors, seems to have been, according to the available evidence, heterosexual. (Valentino's supposed affair with fellow “Latin Lover” Ramon Novarro has no basis in reality.) The female cast is also impressive: Veteran Leslie Caron (Lili, Gigi) as stage and screen star Alla Nazimova, ex-The Mamas & the Papas singer Michelle Phillips as Valentino wife and Nazimova protégée Natacha Rambova, Felicity Kendal as screenwriter/producer June Mathis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), and Carol Kane – lately of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt fame. Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) is notable as one of the greatest musicals ever made. As a 1930s Cabaret presenter – and the Spirit of Germany – Joel Grey was the year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner. Liza Minnelli...

By Lee Pfeiffer

One of the most unfairly neglected WWII films of its era, director Lamont Johnson's 1970 escape thriller The McKenzie Break comes to Blu-ray through Kino Lorber. The movie is rather small in scale with most of the action confined to a Pow camp for German prisoners located in Scotland (though the movie was actually shot in Ireland.) The establishing sequence succinctly makes the film's scenario abundantly clear. The British ostensibly run the camp but the real power is in the hands of the senior German naval officer, Schlueter (Helmut Griem), a 27 year-old true believer in the Nazi cause. In the first scene we observe the inability of the camp's British commandant, Major Perry  (Ian Hendry) to stop a riot orchestrated by Schlueter in protest of plans to shackle twenty five German officers in retaliation to the same action recently done by Germans to British POWs. The British...

By Lee Pfeiffer 

As Cinema Retro gets inundated with DVDs to review during the course of any given year, it's virtually impossible to keep up with all of them in a timely manner. Here are some notable titles you should be aware of:

Cabaret Blu-ray (Warner Home Video): Warner Home Video has inherited the rights to Bob Fosse's classic 1972 film adaptation of the stage production that, in turn, was based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories. The Blu-ray comes packaged in one of those irresistible hardback book formats that is loaded with wonderful photos from the movie. The movie itself holds up superbly even after 40 years. The decline of Germany's Weimar Republic amidst the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s is seen through the eyes of nightclub singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) and her constant companions (Michael York, Helmut Griem) . Fosse's decision to emphasize the sleaze elements...

Musicals have been tap dancing their way into moviegoers' hearts since the invention of cinema sound itself. From Oliver! to Singin' in the Rain, here are the Guardian and Observer critics' picks of the 10 best

• Top 10 documentaries

• Top 10 movie adaptations

• Top 10 animated movies

• Top 10 silent movies

• Top 10 sports movies

• Top 10 film noir

• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s

10. Oliver!

Historically, the British musical has been intertwined with British music, drawing on music hall in the 1940s and the pop charts in the 50s – low-budget films of provincial interest and nothing to trouble the bosses at MGM. In the late 60s, however, the genre enjoyed a brief, high-profile heyday, and between Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence (1967) and Richard Attenborough's star-studded Oh! What A Lovely War (1969) came the biggest of them all: Oliver! (1968), Carol Reed's adaptation of Lionel Bart's 1960 stage hit and the recipient of six Academy awards.

There are plenty of musicals that stand out as among the upper tier of the genre, but few are as easily recognized as both defining and reinventing it at the same time. Cabaret, winner of 8 Oscars, and only missing Best Picture on the technicality of releasing in 1972, pushed the boundaries of the possible abilities and sensibilities available to a musical feature film, and the effects of the new stage it built can be felt all the way to last year’s Les Miserables, which brings forward the surprising power inherent in a showcase of song that is not only not happy, but delivers a variety of emotion based on a solid exposition of the singer’s circumstance. The following of Jean Valjean’s musical efforts closely resembles the now iconic shift in the performance of Cabaret‘s theme song as we work our way to the end of the film.

Blu-ray Book & DVD Release Date: Feb. 5, 2013

Price: DVD $14.97, Blu-ray Book $27.98

Studio: Warner Home Video

Eight-time Oscar-winning musical Cabaret was remastered for its 40th anniversary Blu-ray Book and DVD, which come with new and vintage special features.

The 1972 ground-breaking film stars Liza Minnelli (Arthur) as Sally Bowles, a dancer at a girlie club in pre-war 1931 Berlin. Sally falls in love with British language teacher Brian Roberts (Michael York, Austin Powers in Goldmember), whom she shares with homosexual German baron Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem, The McKenzie Break). But as the Nazis gain power around them, Berlin becomes a trap that Sally’s German friends can not escape.

Cabaret‘s eight Academy Awards honored the movie’s director (Bob Fosse, All That Jazz), actress Minnelli, supporting actor Joel Grey (Kafka), art direction, cinematography, editing, music and sound. It was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture, but didn’t win those categories.

Los Angeles — It took a stray bit of dirt to scratch the perfection of "Cabaret," and painstaking effort to return it to cinematic glory.

The restored "Cabaret," minus damage that had prevented a high-definition version, earned the opening spot at the four-day TCM Classic Film Festival. Stars Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey were scheduled to attend Thursday's ceremony marking the musical's 40th anniversary.

Minnelli, whose turn as cabaret singer Sally Bowles captured a best actress Academy Award and cemented her young stardom, said making "Cabaret" was a joyful "secret," filmed in Munich and far away from meddling Los Angeles studio bosses.

Director Bob Fosse "got away with murder. We all did," Minnelli said in a recent phone call from New York. She's on a concert tour, "Confessions," based on her album of the same title.

"We'd take chances, and the studio would send notes like, `Too cloudy. It will break...

MattCanada here with another week of homo classics. Since I started writing this weekly column about a month ago, I have focused on films which have not been Oscar contenders and not featured the actresses which Nathaniel, me, and all the readers of this website respect (read: worship in a cult-like fashion). So on to Cabaret!

Liza Minnelli's Oscar winning role as Sally Bowles may well be the gayest Oscar win of all time. Now I am not a big Liza fan, actually I actively dislike her in anything else, but in Cabaret she gives one of the most amazing performances in the history of cinema in the greatest movie musical of all time. Not to be hyperbolic or anything, but Liza's Sally and Cabaret are earth shatteringly good. Liza is hardly the only reason to love Cabaret. You can get almost as much pleasure out of Joel Grey and Marisa Berenson's performances,...