Cabaret | 1972
Somewhat toned down from the John Kander-Fred Ebb stage musical, this is still a stylish filming of Christopher Isherwood’s stories of pre-war Berlin and it did pick up no fewer than eight Oscars.
The film sidetracks several characters to put the relationship between straitlaced bisexual writer Brian Roberts (Michael York) and divinely decadent nightclub singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) at the centre.
The film was made entirely in Germany, and takes advantage of some real locations, but the ‘Kit Kat Club’, where the performances of Bowles and the MC (Joel Grey) parallel and comment on the rise of fascism outside, was no more than a set built in the Bavaria Studios, Munich.
Brian’s arrival in ‘Berlin Hauptbahnhof’ station was filmed at Lübeck Hauptbahnhof, in the city of Lübeck, in Schleswig-Holstein, about 35 miles northeast of Hamburg. The station underwent major renovation during the 2000s.
In Berlin itself, Sally encourages Brian to let go of his inhibitions and scream as the train passes overhead beneath the S_Bahnhof on Bleibtreustraße at Savignyplatz. More street scenes were filmed around Berlin, in the Tiergarten.
To the southwest of the city in the Dahlem district, he elegant house of Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson) is 8-12 Koserstrasse. It’s between Peter-Lenné-Strasse and Podbielskialle, just south of Podbielskialle station.
The mansion of Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem) is Schloss Eutin, about 20 miles north of Lübeck (there’s a rail link), which was once the summer residence of the Dukes of Oldenburg. It now houses a museum and is open to the public during summer months.
