Personal Canon ~ #95
All That Jazz
or Bob Fosse's 8 1⁄2

All That Jazz (1979)
Directed by Bob Fosse. Screenplay by Bob Fosse & Robert Alan Aurthur
Starring: Rob Scheider, Anne Reinking, Leland Palmer, Ben Vereen, John Lithgow, Deborah Geffner, Sandahl Bergman and Jessica Lange
Production & Distributor Columbia Pictures & 20th Century Fox Released 12/20/79

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All That Jazz, written and directed by Bob Fosse, lifts its title from the famous opening tune of Kander & Ebb’s stage musical Chicago. That show’s original Broadway production was directed, co-written and choreographed by Fosse himself in 1975. The director undoubtedly felt a certain ownership of that signature opening tune. He may not have written the song but is there any doubt that he lived in those whoopee spots, breathed in cold gin, played pianos hot. Did you hear that Fosse’s queer for all that jazz?

The title of this picture is apt and also thoroughly meta which makes it in 1979, ahead of its time. Riffing on a former Fosse triumph is just the beginning of the self-indulgence. Though Fosse did make one more film after it (Star 80, 1983) All That Jazz was his last triumphant hurrah as one of the most influential cultural figures of his time. True to the director’s showbiz bravado, he trained Jazz’s lens on the last hurrah of its fictional director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider). To Fosse’s credit no fiction is forced. The director repeatedly presents his alter ego in reflected doubled images (like the still shown above) cheekily underlining the Gideon/Fosse oneness. This is a warts-and-all autobiographical picture of Fosse’s own larger than life persona -- his life, love, work and legend. Joe Gideon is not a character. It’s a stage name.

Now, on to that stage.

The charismatic murderess Velma Kelly sings “All That Jazz” with flirtatious invitation to open Chicago. Fosse, a kindred show spirit if Velma ever had one, is even more aggressive when he kicks things off. He skips Velma’s “rouge my knees” foreplay and immediately jumps to the chorus, throwing the blinking lights of the title on the screen.

"it's showtime folks"

Gideon is so cocksure he almost says that signature line to the camera. Instead he addresses it to the audience he loves most: he says it to the mirror. And then we’re on the stage. Gideon is auditioning dancers for a new show and aside from the multiple angle quick cuts, it almost plays like cinema verite. It’s such an authentic snapshot of Broadway in the 70s we probably didn’t even need a film version of A Chorus Line. You can practically smell the desperation and the flop sweat on the dancers. But it’s not A Chorus Line and we don’t stay with them for long. In the first twenty minutes we also get asides to Gideon in a prop filled room reminiscing about his life with a woman in white (Jessica Lange), a trip to the editing room where Gideon/Fosse works on a film… let’s just call it Lenny (Fosse’s previous film), a flashback to his vaudeville years, and lots of conversations with different women. On first viewing All That Jazz can play a bit disjointed and random -- it’s so busy showing that it’s hard to wrap your head around the telling but stay with it: your close attention is rewarded. The film may appear to have A.D.D. but Fosse isn’t wasting a second of screentime. In the first act (roughly twenty minutes) he establishes everything. You get: the particulars of Gideon’s day to day life; the particulars of his career which is also his life “work… that’s all there is”; his multiple addictions; that the film is actually about death (Someone somewhere has written an entire dissertation on the five stages of death as portrayed in All That Jazz and the film within the film… or at least someone should have); and introductions to six women in this womanizer's life (his mother, an angel of death, his ex-wife and daughter, a longtime girlfriend and his latest conquest).

All That Jazz is nothing if not a superb multi-tasker. Improbably the movie keeps all of these plates spinning in each subsequent act. They each begin with Gideon’s morning “showtime” ritual: music, pillpopping, showering and eye drops and are followed by the next stage of the linear self-destruction as Gideon works, fucks, drugs, and chainsmokes himself to an early grave. It's all intercut with his memoir-like conversations with death. The effect of all of this multitasking is both deepening and dizzying. Enjoying it is easy, writing about it is another thing entirely. To love All That Jazz is to to be made crazy by it. Gideon's women would surely understand.

About those women… for such an incisive portrait of the life and death of one self-involved man, All That Jazz doesn’t skimp on those in his orbit. Gideon may treat his women deplorably but Fosse, depicting this shortcoming, is actually generous to them: he gifts ex-wife, mistress, and daughter with great musical numbers and he remains sympathetic to the damage he’s done. But I shouldn’t overstate this case, for true to the primary concerns of the movie the group portrait of the women is also essentially the portrait of the entertainer, too. His relationships with these women are not interchangeable and the women are not nameless but like everything else in this busy film, there’s a lot of blurred lines and intriguing overlap. Consider the introduction of Victoria Porter (Deborah Geffner), another in the long line of the director’s conquests, which is all entangled with the introduction of his ex-wife Audrey (Leland Palmer essentially playing Gwen Verdon) and child Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi). Fosse and his cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno and editor Alan Heim (all three were Oscar nominated ) come up with telling shots and juxtapositions.

We see Victoria dancing and there’s this wordless shot of Gideon pointing at her --this is the one he wants. Moments later he’s shamelessly flirting with her onstage in front of the entire chorus line while picking his final dancers. A few more lines of dialogue and then he’s running to the back of the theater to the ex-wife and child who’ve been watching and waiting. How’s this for a loaded first line to these neglected girls?

“Those are the girls I want. OK with you?”

Check out the expression on his ex-wife’s face. Ouch.

Gideon’s life is his work and there are no boundaries, everything is the same. This is how effortlessly Fosse shows the clusterfuck: look at the shot of Gideon opening the door to let Victoria in for their first tryst. He's just been on the phone "I’ve got to work on the show” When the line is combined with the narrative image, it sounds like a lie. But then, for Gideon, is it? It’s all the same thing: women, speed, sex, alcohol, shows, films, dance. They’re all consumed in unison, each informing the other in some way.

Later there's a fight with Katie (like Audrey, a constant female companion rather than a discarded fling) which ends in this tremendous exchange

Gideon: I try to give you everything I can give
Katie: [teary-eyed] Oh you give all right. Presents, clothes… I just wish you weren’t so generous with your cock.
(pause)
Gideon: That’s good. Maybe I can use that sometime.

…and he’s walking out of the room, already committing the line to memory determined to exploit their romance for play or film fodder. Of course in the larger sense, that’s what Bob Fosse is doing with All That Jazz itself. His women are essentially partners in his crime even though they’re also victims. This is most obvious when it comes to Ann Reinking who, many years after her lover's death, still keeps his legacy tapping with her work on Fosse shows like Chicago and other tributes. Ann is Katie in the way that Fosse is Gideon. I should add: she plays herself superbly. Katie and ex-wife Audrey and Victoria are all dancers and surely their physicality inspires Gideon's last minute stroke of genius in regards to "Air Erotica" the big number of the show within the film and also, because this is all so very meta, All That Jazz's centerpiece, too. I've seen it many times and it never fails to deliver a horny jolt. To see it is to realize with sudden clarity how asexual most movies are.

Even Gideon’s own mother and daughter aren't safe from the sexualization. He calls his mother “chubby, jolly…and sexy” and laughs at his own incorrigibility. When we meet her we see that she is those things but then she starts to talk about naked women. Fosse takes us right into a humiliating sexual encounter between an underage Gideon and burlesque dancers who bring him to orgasm. Gideon is also shown dancing intimately with his daughter “wrap your legs around me” while she grills him about his numerous girlfriends and why he doesn’t commit to any of them, particularly Katie. Not your typical father/daughter conversation. Or if not that, at least atypical in its honesty.

And finally there’s the matter of the angel of death. It’s telling that it’s a woman: all the important characters are. But in a particularly cheeky move, Fosse imagines that even death is not immune to his charms. They flirt openly throughout. Gideon may have resisted commitment to multiple women but finally he is defeated by this one. Who can refuse death?

In the final aggressive set pieces that close the film, Fosse stacks musical sequences on musical sequences with no breathing room and an ever escalating scale. Only Gideon's death (Fosse's imagined own) can stop the music. It is in this last act that All That Jazz cements itself as an unqualified triumph.

It’s all “love me or leave me (but I know that you’ll love me)” self aggrandizement. The women in Gideon’s life have encouraged this confidence of course, enabling him with continued loved even after the many leavings. For all the troubled psychology on display, the movie works a similar sick hold on the audience. It’s hard to resist Fosse’s flair even when it seems like you should be turned off by the pretense, the tacky grandeur, and the self-love. But arrogant genius is still genius and that's always worth loving. This showman’s instincts for entertainment and his trust in the audience to keep up with his fascinating structure and final imaginative leap into the beyond pay off beautifully.

That last minute explosion of glitz more than earns the film’s title but when I talk about the movie I almost always tack on the possessive, calling it Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. That's appropriate if redundant. You could also call it Bob Fosse and speak true. Some people refer to it as Bob Fosse’s 8 1⁄2. Like Federico Fellini (another auteur with a taste for multiple ladies) and his numerically named masterpiece, All That Jazz is a hallucinatory parade of a director’s well known obsessions: all the familiar tropes, signatures, themes are tossed into a blender and served up with unforgettable flair... and girls, girls, girls.

 

-Nathaniel R

discuss on blog or continue to index of the Personal Canon: 100 Movies