SYNOPSIS: English tutor living but not loving in Berlin in the early 1930s, platonic-ally befriends an English lass of uncertain virtue — and little brains.
NOTES: Van Druten's stage adaptation opened on Broadway at the Empire on 28 November 1951 and ran a quite successful 262 performances. Winning the 1951 New York Drama Critics Circle award certainly helped. The stars were Julie Harris and William Prince, with Marian Winters, Olga Fabian, Martin Brooks, Edward Andrews and Catherine Willard. Van Druten himself directed. In 1966 the play was turned into a musical called "Cabaret", starring Jill Haworth, Bert Convy, Joel Grey, Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford.
The film was re-made as "Cabaret" (1972) with Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem and Joel Grey, directed by Bob Fosse. In both America and England, this film failed to echo the success of the stage play. In Australia, however, the movie was one of the biggest box-office hits of the year.
COMMENT: Features a luminous performance by Julie Harris, who creates enormous sympathy for a character that is on paper little more than a superficial, scatterbrained kook. Such is the vividness of her portrait that she emerges as a far more likable personality than the intense, convicted Isherwood who is played by Laurence Harvey with all the sparkle of a wet blanket.
Anton Diffring does better than one might expect with a sympathetic part (his usual forte was nasty SS lieutenants) but Shelley Winters plays her department store heiress like a drab, colorless shop-girl.
The only player who can match Julie Harris is Ron Randell who gives a delightfully larger-than-life account of a lavish-spending American playboy.
Most of the action still takes place in the one set, though there are frequent excursions outside, but Henry Genevieve Cornelius is not a sufficiently skilled or imaginative director to disguise the film's stage origins completely. Perhaps he didn't wish to. In any event, his direction could best be described as unobtrusive.
Other credits are likewise serviceable without being in any way distinguished or memorable, though the film has obviously been realized on a fair-sized but by no means lavish budget.
NOTES: Van Druten's stage adaptation opened on Broadway at the Empire on 28 November 1951 and ran a quite successful 262 performances. Winning the 1951 New York Drama Critics Circle award certainly helped. The stars were Julie Harris and William Prince, with Marian Winters, Olga Fabian, Martin Brooks, Edward Andrews and Catherine Willard. Van Druten himself directed. In 1966 the play was turned into a musical called "Cabaret", starring Jill Haworth, Bert Convy, Joel Grey, Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford.
The film was re-made as "Cabaret" (1972) with Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem and Joel Grey, directed by Bob Fosse. In both America and England, this film failed to echo the success of the stage play. In Australia, however, the movie was one of the biggest box-office hits of the year.
COMMENT: Features a luminous performance by Julie Harris, who creates enormous sympathy for a character that is on paper little more than a superficial, scatterbrained kook. Such is the vividness of her portrait that she emerges as a far more likable personality than the intense, convicted Isherwood who is played by Laurence Harvey with all the sparkle of a wet blanket.
Anton Diffring does better than one might expect with a sympathetic part (his usual forte was nasty SS lieutenants) but Shelley Winters plays her department store heiress like a drab, colorless shop-girl.
The only player who can match Julie Harris is Ron Randell who gives a delightfully larger-than-life account of a lavish-spending American playboy.
Most of the action still takes place in the one set, though there are frequent excursions outside, but Henry Genevieve Cornelius is not a sufficiently skilled or imaginative director to disguise the film's stage origins completely. Perhaps he didn't wish to. In any event, his direction could best be described as unobtrusive.
Other credits are likewise serviceable without being in any way distinguished or memorable, though the film has obviously been realized on a fair-sized but by no means lavish budget.