All That Jazz
Bob Fosse (1979)
The protagonist of All That Jazz is Joe Gideon, celebrated both as a director-choreographer for the Broadway stage and as a movie director. As well as being creatively driven and demanding, Joe is a chain-smoking, pill-popping womaniser. He’s in the throes of preparing a new stage musical, striving for something radically erotic in spite of the anxious conventionality of the show’s songwriter and the play-it-commercially-safe prejudices of its producers. At the same time, Joe’s editing a movie about a scabrous, dark curly-haired, stand-up comic. Joe collapses with chest pains and undergoes open heart surgery. Shortly after he devised Chicago for the stage (All That Jazz takes its name, of course, from that show’s opening number) and completed his screen biopic of Lenny Bruce, Bob Fosse fell seriously ill with heart disease. Joe Gideon dies at the end of the movie. Fosse died, aged only 60, in 1987. All That Jazz is personal film-making of a peculiarly literal and exciting kind, and, in retrospect, a self-lacerating commemoration of the man who made it.
One of the highlights of Fosse’s first movie musical, Sweet Charity, is his staging of ‘The Rhythm of Life’. The rhythm of Joe Gideon’s life, even though his death becomes its subject, is what All That Jazz has abundantly, thanks in no small part to Alan Heim’s brilliant editing. The film starts at full pelt and, although the tempo changes once Joe is in hospital, its momentum is never lost – until, perhaps, the final, overlong ‘Bye Bye Life’ number (a big production take on the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’). Fosse punctuates the narrative with a repeated (but, at each repetition, slightly varied) montage of Joe’s morning routine – pills, eye drops, shower, a look in the mirror as he tells himself ‘It’s showtime!’ The routine is scored by Vivaldi’s concerto for strings, a striking contrast to the pop and show tunes used elsewhere in the picture. Like its main character, All That Jazz survives – thrives – on its energy levels. The satire of Broadway and Hollywood production is broad, not to say crude, but the hyper-vitality carries you along, persuades you that it couldn’t be done any other way, and makes the hectic, detailed caricatures enjoyable. Some things are pushed to ludicrous extremes – like a smoker’s cough competition between Joe and his heart specialist, which the latter wins convincingly – but these sequences are still amusing.
The film includes some brilliant pieces of choreography, not all of them featuring dance as such. There’s a read-through of a script in which the laughing faces of the actors are accompanied not by their voices but by the amplified sounds of Joe’s dissatisfied, irritably tapping fingers. The normal soundtrack returns with the final line of the script – ‘I guess only in America can a 24-year-old girl like me own a house like this in Beverly Hills’. This is spoken by Joe’s ex-wife, Audrey, who, we already know, he thinks is way too old for the part she’s reading for. Among the actual dance sequences, the one in which Audrey’s limber exercises try to convince Joe that she is right for the role – and which make her hopeful she’s succeeded – is startling. There are some characteristically brilliant ensemble pieces – especially an exaggeratedly carnal air flight – but it’s the numbers in which characters use dance with either dialogue or song to express their feelings in relation to Joe that have the most impact. A routine performed in his apartment by Joe’s daughter Michelle and his current girlfriend Katie, accompanied by ‘Some of These Days’, is especially successful.
In a remarkably imaginative piece of casting, Roy Scheider, best known at the time for playing shrewd, essentially undemonstrative men in The French Connection and Jaws, is Joe Gideon. Because Joe is so obviously Bob Fosse, you worry at first that Scheider will be expected to be no more than Fosse’s on-screen proxy and it’s a very challenging role. The director’s self-portraiture in All That Jazz has been compared to Fellini’s in 8½ but Fosse’s thoroughgoing self-criticism gives the actor representing him less scope to be sympathetic than Marcello Mastroianni had. It’s to Scheider’s credit that he overcomes this difficulty – that he makes Joe a charismatic and, in some respects, likeable bastard. (Fosse may well have enjoyed that, of course.) And Scheider’s electricity is a revelation. Of the many women in Joe’s life, the main ones are played by Leland Palmer (Audrey, supposedly based on Gwen Verdon), Ann Reinking (Katie) and Erszebet Foldi (Michelle). Although she’s incarnated by Jessica Lange, the least successful female character is the Angel of Death, who converses with Joe. The Angel is relatively disappointing probably because she’s an idea rather than a character. Among the men, John Lithgow is amusing as the bitchy rival director brought in to stage Joe’s show when he’s in hospital. Cliff Gorman is so good as the subversive stand-up he makes you wish that he, rather than Dustin Hoffman, had played the lead in the film Lenny (Gorman had played the role in Julian Barry’s play on Broadway). Fosse’s accustomed flair for realising the tawdry vitality of show business is particularly in evidence in the sequences where the teenage Joe (Keith Gordon) is performing in burlesque clubs. The movie is also a celebration of the bodies of dancers, especially female dancers. (The cinematographer was Giuseppe Rotunno.) Viewed at this distance in time, All That Jazz makes you nostalgic for the days when a film like this could be made in Hollywood (by 20th Century Fox) and a film-maker was prepared to put his life on screen in such an idiosyncratic and exhilarating way.
9 February 2014