All that Jazz

 I should watch Bob Fosse's All that Jazz once every few years.  The film is astonishingly good.  The first couple times I saw this 1979 movie, I didn't notice that it was a musical and, in fact, structured like the great movie musicals of the forties and 1950's.  The film's surrealist touches and its uncompromising portrait of Fosse (played by Roy Scheider, the protagonist called Josh Gideon in the movie) as well as its documentary style exploration of the mechanics of producing a Broadway musical, complete with interludes featuring accounting and insurance, can easily mislead a viewer, particularly a naive one like me.  When I saw the picture in the theater, I thought it was a confessional work in which Fosse's misdeeds and betrayals are portrayed in relentless, if strangely egomaniacal, detail.  But Fosse is dead now and most of the women whom he loved have gone to their reward as well and, from a perspective of almost 50 years, the film now stands revealed as an artifact closer to Singin' in the Rain or The Band Wagon which it parallels, than to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.  Fosse was alive and creative when All that Jazz first graced the silver screen and his controversial presence, his crimes and misdemeanors, all cast a shadow over the movie.  Critics either lacerated the film for its hubris:  Fosse's arrogance for somehow portraying his glamorous infidelity as something like the engine for his creativity and the fatal flaw from which all his merit flowed.  Or critics lauded the movie for its brilliance, flamboyance, and courage.  I began in the former camp and I think I'm now in the latter, an admirer of the movie.  I'm in good company:  Stanley Kubrick said that All that Jazz was the greatest movie ever made.  The picture is akin to another masterpiece of self-loathing:  Fellini's 8 1/2 -- neither 8 1/2  or All That Jazz should work, but, somehow, mysteriously they do.  

Fosse shamelessly exploits sordid episodes in his life for the film's subject matter.  The luminous Ann Reinking plays Kate, Gideon's main girlfriend on whom he cheats at every opportunity.  (Ann Reinking, in fact, had been Fosse's girlfriend after his marriage to Gwen Verdon collapsed due to his serial infidelities; the film shows Gideon casually betraying her, forgetting that he has made an assignation with her for later in the evening and, then, having sex with another woman and falling asleep only to be discovered with the other woman in his bed by Kate who has let herself into the apartment.  Presumably, this mirrors some actual event.)  None of this matters much; time has erased the shame and it's possible, I think, to admire the movie for its technical and narrative achievements.  The remarkable aspect of the film is that it incorporates all the classical song-and-dance sequences of the conventional Hollywood musical, but so seamlessly that we don't notice these interventions as separate "numbers" or set pieces in the picture.  For instance, Fosse stages a big casting scene to a funk version of "On Broadway" -- we see hundreds of dancers lunging and spinning and the effect is exhilarating.  But this isn't merely a dance sequence but a part of the narrative which generally follows the plot arc of Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon -- an account of Broadway professionals producing a complicated big-budget musical.  There are two outstanding dance duets -- Fosse dances with his daughter who seems to be about 13 years old and, then, dances with the lissome Leland Palmer playing his first wife; both scenes are ballet-derived and involve Fosse circling his partner, lifting her, and setting her spinning.  (The scenes have some of the natural and organic qualities of the sequence in The Band Wagon in which Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse tentatively try to match their respective dance styles -- he's a tap-dancing hoofer and she's a famous ballerina -- as they stroll through Central Park.)  The pas de deux scenes in All that Jazz are so low-key and realistic seeming (both the little girl and the older woman are practicing their craft in the studio) that it has never registered with me that these are bravura dance-duets.  In the first, Gideon discusses his womanizing with his adolescent daughter as he chastely lifts and embraces her for the duet.  In the second, Leland Palmer, who is wearing a transparent leotard, slinks and slumps all over Gideon, moving seductively alongside him as if to remind the choreographer of their sexual relationship.  In this scene, Palmer taunts Gideon for "being so generous with his cock" and says that he can't even recall the names of the dozens of women hom he has seduced during their marriage..  Gideon is dismayed by his ex-wife's weirdly erotic condemnation of his bad behavior, but, in a remarkable development, turns her denunciation into an astonishing dance number -- this is the "Fly me" jazz dance which looks like an orgy orchestrated by Tom of Finland; the piece is sizzling hot but, ultimately, intended as a demonstration of the meaninglessness of casual sexual encounters.  In fact, at the end of the number, which involves flailing nude dancers and much homosexual activity, the participants call out their names as they shake hands and bid farewell to their lovers whom they scarcely know.  The musical's financial backers are horrified at the open eroticism on display.  But Gideon's ex-wife bursts into tears at seeing the work -- she knows that it is the artistic materialization of her soliloquy condemning her husband's promiscuity. Gideon has taken her condemnation and make it into something profound and beautiful.  And, indeed, the piece embodies both the disgrace and seductive power of promiscuous sex, orgies, bathhouse encounters -- it's fantastically exciting and, also, decadent and wicked and disturbing.  The piece has its cake and eats it too.  

The end of the film also derives from the finales of a number of famous musicals, most prominently Singin' in the Rain (we actually see a reprise of the dance in the flooded street, but here in a flooded boiler room) and The Band Wagon.  Both of these musicals initiate their final sequences in what seems like a recording of an actual Broadway dance number, but, then, expand into a vast and labyrinthine production that could never be mounted on stage. Fosse does something similar.  His hero has suffered a heart attack and is hospitalized.  Despite the cardiac event, Gideon has his friends smuggle cigarettes and booze into the hospital; unregenerate, he makes passes at the nurses.  But, ultimately, his heart continues to fail.  After a gory open heart surgery scene, he's in the recovery room when he suffers yet another heart attack.  The film slips into hallucination --  Gideon splits:  he is shown lying comatose in his hospital bed, breathing through a  respirator, and, also, operating a movie camera mounted on a crane that films increasingly febrile visions.  At last, the scene shifts to a womb-like dark interior, its sides slick with reflections on some kind of funereal plastic -- the characters in the movie are seated in bleachers and dancers with their bodies swathed in diagrams of their circulatory systems gyrate next to sinister rock-and-roll band.  Mannequin heads with flashlight eyes swivel, impassively recording the increasingly frenzied song and dance action in this gloomy, surreal amphitheater.  Ben Vereen plays the host at these proceedings and he jerks around spastically while the band plays variations on the song "Bye, Bye Love".  Jessica Lange playing the Angel of Death who has been shown in dialogue with Gideon has come to embrace her lover -- she suggests that Gideon was always half in love with her.  And, in a jarring final shot, we see Gideon's corpse on a table being zipped into a body bag.  The effect is devastating.  All that Jazz is shallow and tawdry and the points it makes are, more or less,apologetic and obvious.  But it's also great.