All That Jazz

ALL THAT JAZZ            A                

USA  (123 mi)  1979  d:  Bob Fosse

What’s the matter? Don’t you like musical comedy?
—Joe Gideon (Bob Fosse) appealing to God

Talk about a movie with a death wish, this is a movie that explains what a heart attack feels like, where you’d think with this level of intimate autobiographical detail about death that the director would have dropped dead on the set somewhere, but he survived another eight years.  While the critical consensus claims this autobiographical Bob Fosse piece is a take-off on Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), not really, as it doesn’t have the plotless, stream-of-conscience, avant-garde modernism that implies being at a creative stand-still and existential impasse.  Instead, Fosse continually draws inspiration throughout the entire film, even including his infamous death sequence which he turns into an extended, deliciously irreverent, musical song and dance number.  One must give due consideration to Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS (1965), which is flush with surreal, extravagantly idealized hallucinogenic set pieces filled with dancing showgirls.  Fosse’s continuous stream of womanizing rivals that of the surrealistic Fellini drama as seen from his wife Giuletta Masina’s jealous and increasingly exaggerated point of view, where every woman he goes out with becomes a voluptuous beauty that is so ravagingly attractive that no mere mortal could resist.  Both films feature artists that love living in the surreal world, where the world of the living is where all the problems occur, so they both have a great deal of difficulty determining where the dream ends and reality begins.  Fosse (Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon) has a repeating shower sequence set to the music of Vivaldi every morning with eyedrops along with a handful of Dexedrine to get him started each day. Rarely is he ever seen without a cigarette dangling from his mouth.  The constant use of pills, booze, and cigarettes create a pervasive theme of death that haunts the entire film, even including an everpresent angel of death, Jessica Lange (in only her second film after the 1976 remake of KING KONG), foreseeing the New York City AIDS scare of the early 1980’s, where death ravaged the theater district, leaving a devastating impact. 

This is a film where the director continually takes chances and pushes the boundaries, using experimental devices to express the visible disorientation of the Fosse character, who has a continual back and forth, satirically humorous dialogue with a mysterious angel hovering at his side, who quickly loses his concentration from one idea to the next, or one character to the next, changing time spans, continually intermixing thoughts in his head as he’s developing and reworking pieces in his head, often with abrupt visual cuts and simply brilliant editing, where in the reading of the dialogue from a new show the sound actually disappears altogether for an extended duration, as Gideon literally spaces out on the real world.  However nothing is more shocking than a brilliant hospital sequence where he films his own death, actually structured upon an interwoven comedy routine by Frankie Man on Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 final stages of death, an extremely imaginative, wickedly clever, musical montage from a near death state of hallucination that turns pleasantly familiar song lyrics into a cruel and sick joke on himself.  The aggressively sarcastic and irreverent tone may not be for everyone, but it’s clear the style is highly inventive, which when added to the appeal of his jazzy, meticulously choreographed dance numbers make this one of the more uniquely original films ever made.  Fosse got his start as a dancer and quickly earned a reputation as a supremely gifted choreographer for which he won no less than eight Tony Awards, but he surprised everyone when for CABARET (1972), a song and dance musical, Fosse actually won the Academy Award for Best Director over Francis Ford Coppolla in THE GODFATHER (1972), currently listed as the #2 (Top 250 #2) greatest film on the IMDb all-time list.   Fosse revived the interest in song and dance movies, as these are arguably the two best musicals made in the past twenty-five years, perhaps since Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954)

What’s unusual about the success of this film is that the songs themselves, unlike Fosse’s CABARET (1972), are not showstoppers.  Instead it’s the staged, theatrical inventiveness of the incomparable dancing routines that take one’s breath away.  The exception is the highly appealing opening number set to the music of George Benson’s “On Broadway” All that Jazz ' Opening " On Broadway " YouTube (8:27), which really sets a likeable tone for the film, as the audience quickly identifies with a thriving energy, as Fosse punctuates the seemingly impossible physical and artistic demands of life in the theater, creating a mesmerizing backstage portrait that includes his ex-wife, Leland Palmer as Audrey (based on Fosse’s third wife, Broadway star Gwen Verdon), his adorable daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) and current girlfriend Kate (Ann Reinking, Fosse’s live-in partner), where all three women are featured in exceptional dance sequences.  One of the best and easily the happiest number in the movie is “Everything Old Is New Again,” All That Jazz—"Everything Old Is New Again" YouTube (3:28), lovingly performed for Gideon by Michelle and Kate, an affectionate portrait contrasting the young and old that is wildly free and uninhibited, while the centerpiece of the film and perhaps the most extraordinary example of modern dance on celluloid takes this whimsical and bouncy musical ditty, All That Jazz " Take Off With Us " YouTube (1:14), and turns it into this completely restructured, highly evolved, erotic ballet, 'Take Off With Us' from 'All That Jazz' (Fosse, 1979) on Vimeo (7:46), a modern era dance masterpiece that is incredibly shot as a rehearsal once-through.  Where this all leads is to an inevitable heart attack, where confined to a bed Gideon starts imagining song and dance sequences that have a chilling element of personal truth for him, where a similar idea resurfaces again as a fantasy Raymond Chandler escapist novel in both a British TV mini-series (1986) and Keith Gordon’s remake of THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003), where ironically Gordon plays a young Joe Gideon in Fosse’s film.  The magical finale opens with four elaborately connecting showbiz production numbers, All That Jazz (1979) "Hospital Hallucination, Take 1" scene HD  YouTube (10:06), leading into the sickest rendition of the Everly Brothers “Bye Bye Love” Everly Brothers - Bye Bye Love [Very Good quality]. YouTube (1:29) ever conceived, emcee’d by the incomparable Ben Vereen, seen here All That Jazz - Bye Bye Life (HD) YouTube (9:48) as a phantasmagoric, musical tribute to death and dying.