Favorite Movies: All That Jazz

Bob Fosse‘s masterpiece isn’t merely a self-portrait: it’s a self-referendum, so revealing that it feels like an act of penance. One imagines that by surviving for another eight years after the film’s release, Fosse surprised himself. All That Jazz is fraught with an confessional urgency, as though his eventual death of a heart attack at age 60 were actually right around the corner – or indeed, already past.

The film establishes a netherworld meeting between Fosse alter ego Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider, in his finest performance) and a dulcet-voiced Angel of Death (Jessica Lange), and from there refers back to Gideon’s earthly life and its merits and demerits. The glib assessment would be to say that there are more of the latter, but this would both oversimplify and mis-characterize the object of the film, namely: is there redemption for Joe Gideon?

There’s a lot to redeem. The real-world, present-day bulk of the film establishes Gideon in the process of working himself to death by directing and choreographing a new Broadway musical and simultaneously directing a feature film. He puts his dancers through marathon rehearsals and butts heads creatively with the show’s producers, and then heads across town to burn the midnight oil in the editing bay with his film. All the while he smokes relentlessly and pops pills regularly (and does both during the repeated “getting ready in the morning” montages, each of which end with Gideon announcing to the bathroom mirror, “It’s showtime, folks!”).

Yet Joe Gideon is not a complete asshole. Obsessive and intense though he is, he inspires loyalty in his dancers, and even reciprocates it a little. His estranged wife Audrey (Leland Palmer), pre-teen daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) and live-in girlfriend Kate Jagger (Ann Reinking) all adore him, even though the latter two end up spending a disproportionate amount of time with each other while Joe neglects them both.

Their affection for him — and each other — is well evidenced in this clip:

Speaking of loyalty and affection for Gideon/Fosse, consider the fact that the role played by Ann Reinking in All That Jazz was based directly on herself, i.e., her own role in Bob Fosse’s life. She was a dancer in one of his shows and became his live-in girlfriend, while he remained married to Broadway star Gwen Verdon (represented in the film by the Leland Palmer character), the mother of his daughter Nicole (the Erzsebet Foldi character; Nicole herself has a non-speaking cameo in the movie). Furthermore, by the time of All That Jazz Reinking and Fosse’s romantic relationship had ended — not that it stopped her from playing the role in the movie. In fact, both Verdon and Reinking worked with Fosse multiple times after their personal breakups with him. In further fact, when Verdon eventually left her role in the original Broadway production of Chicago, Fosse hired Reinking as her replacement; later, Fosse cast Reinking in the lead of the Broadway revival of Sweet Charity, a role created in the original production by Verdon.

Bob Fosse’s early triumphs (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, etc) contained little of the somber cynicism would characterize his mature works (Cabaret, Pippin, Lenny, et al.). Significantly, it is the opening number of Fosse’s 1975 show Chicago – the cheeky vaudevillian tale of nihilism and murder – that is echoed in this film’s title. The “jazz” of Fosse parlance doesn’t simply refer to the so-named genre of American music, but rather to a broader type of expressive distortion. Jazz is the spiky prism through which the plain nature of things is twisted and refracted. Throughout the Fosse oeuvre, “jazz” is used variously as a euphemism for sex, greed, dance, music, alcohol, drugs, and so on. Jazz is everything fun, naughty and a bit dangerous, the stuff we all like a little more than we’re willing to admit. All of us, that is, except for Bob Fosse, who was perfectly willing to admit just how jazzy he was.