(#WhatThomWatched the third)
All That Jazz
(Bob Fosse, 1979; Criterion spine 724)
Roy Scheider is indelible in his high-profile 1970’s roles: as Gene Hackman’s turtlenecked, slicked-down partner in The French Connection, or behind those large wire-frames and that drooping cigarette in Jaws, muttering about a bigger boat. He’s a great actor in much lesser movies too, and even in his three seasons on television’s seaQuest DSV. But his Joe Gideon in All That Jazz is transformational — his greatest creation. A thinly-disguised double for choreographer and film director Bob Fosse, Scheider is completely convincing as a sardonic, driven genius with many weaknesses — not least an unending internal flow of self-doubt which belies his massive talent, accomplishments in multiple spheres, and huge circle of family and collaborators who love and accept him (ex-lovers just as strongly as anyone). In All That Jazz’s brave construction, naturalistic scenes of casting a Broadway show, rehearsals, choreography sessions, and film editing are interwoven with a fantastical visualization of that stream-of-consciousness in the form of a conversation with a beautiful angel of death, expanding in the film’s final thirty minutes to an extended dream sequence as Gideon, hospitalized for heart surgery, drifts toward and away from life's end. Musical numbers thus fit seamlessly into either narrative strand: as real-life scenes based on Gideon’s choreography job, or as internal fantasy. The editing (by longtime Fosse collaborator Alan Heim) between and among these points of view is mind-blowing.
Reminds me of:
From our perspective now, so much of what Fosse did has been imitated, badly, and the endless bad imitations have been endlessly mocked; consider Exhibit A: "Jazz hands!!” And yet none of this takes away from the real thing in the least. Viewing other musicals from the same late-seventies-early-eighties time frame, we see a few “big numbers” that have some superficial resemblance to Fosse — that endless roller disco in Xanadu, or the ridiculous “Satan’s Alley” production in Staying Alive — but they don’t compare; in fact, the final dying hallucinations in Jazz are so unique and so bold that I’m hard-pressed to come up with anything similar. I do like to imagine that Forbidden Zone, the no-budget cult film directed by Richard Elfman and featuring the first score by his brother Danny Elfman, took some inspiration from the Fosse visions in Jazz which had been released just the previous year; extended sequences in Zone are set in Hell and have avant-garde images which resemble the do-it-yourself version of a full-Technicolor musical, and indeed the two movies both use the Shelton Brooks standard “Some of These Days” (sung by Gideon’s daughter in the surgery hallucination, while characters in Zone lip-sync to Cab Calloway’s version). For that matter, the use of repurposed standards — both early stage songs and newer pop like “Bye Bye Love” — with altered or recontextualized lyrics to further the story is a trick used in movies like Moulin Rouge, and, I suppose (to lesser effect) in the current rash of “jukebox musicals.”
I'm also a complete sucker for the metaphysical games which occur when a helpless, muzzled version of Scheider's character is confronted by his mocking doppelganger:
But also — the guilt!
I need to re-watch Fosse’s Lenny, the Lenny Bruce biopic which shows up as a work in progress in Jazz under the name Standup — and I need to watch or re-watch all of his other films, even the failures, just to see more of his work! (that includes his early choreography jobs like Damn Yankees and his underperforming Sweet Charity, and of course the flawless Cabaret). Just generally, there are a slew of hard-edged musicals which I’ve never seen. (I just got Criterion’s Jacques Demy collection on Blu-ray, six weepers, of which I’ve only seen Umbrellas of Cherbourg in the past -- so that’ll help even the score. No pun intended.)
Pitch:
Every musical number, dream or real, is a keeper, but if I had to pick one . . . . I have a friend, a singer and pianist who has recorded several albums, one of which contains (and is named after) the Peter Allen standard “Everything Old is New Again,” which has become part of my own endless internal monologue*; that number, danced in Jazz as a surprise gift for Scheider’s character by his daughter and his lover (Erzsébet Földi and Ann Reinking), is perfect — a perfect performance of a perfect song. It’s not representative of the movie’s tone — it is the peak from which the characters must fall — but it’s still a pretty good reason to watch the whole. “Let’s go backwards when forward fails . . . .”
*If you’re interested, search for
“Daryl Ott, Everything Old is New Again”
in iTunes, Amazon, or your favorite source for digital music.
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