Reviews and notes
Festivals:
1980 Cannes (Palme d'Or)
2013 Taipei
2014 San Francisco
2017 [Restored} Beijing, Cannes
Inspired by Federico Fellini’s
8 1/2 (1963),
All That Jazz is Bob Fosse’s arresting rumination on the limitations of his own character and talent, seen through the prism of an onscreen doppelganger. The movie depicts a tumultuous chapter in the life of film director/choreographer/theater director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), who juggles the challenges of transforming a hokey stage musical into something fresh with long hours spent obsessively refining his latest movie, a biopic about a comedian that echoes Fosse’s
Lenny (1974). Gideon also juggles intense relationships with several women, including a wife (Leland Palmer) and a girlfriend (Ann Reinking) driven to distraction by Gideon’s infidelities. Yet the protagonist’s true love might actually be Death, portrayed as an angelic beauty by Jessica Lange, because since his earliest days as a youth performer in raunchy burlesque shows (as shown in stylized dream sequences/flashbacks), Gideon’s been fascinated by the high-wire act of risking disastrous failure in order to chase extraordinary success...
All That Jazz is a film of rare psychological complexity and depth. Scheider gives the most nuanced and surprising performance of his career, beautifully depicting every contradictory aspect of the main character; the decidedly non-musical performer even dives headfirst into a full-on musical number, and looks graceful guiding dancers through their moves (with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Fosse-style).
- Peter Hanson, Every 70s Movie, 30 November 2010.
All That Jazz tells the story of Joe Gideon, a chain-smoking, hard-driving, pill-popping alcoholic womanizer who also happens to be a supremely talented designer of dance routines. Gideon is much in demand by showbiz movers and shakers, though he’s almost equally feared and distrusted by those same influencers due to the disruptive twists he frequently tosses into his creative efforts. We’re introduced to Gideon in a powerful opening scene as he magistrates over an open casting call, sifting through a crowd of hundreds of hopeful recruits all looking to get a potentially star-making (or at least rent-paying) gig in his latest production. The scene is scored to George Benson’s hit recording of
On Broadway, and effectively serves notice that this is a film intent on grabbing the attention of its audience and not letting go until its creator is good and ready to turn us loose after getting its message across.
Once we’re launched into the dancer’s world and all its attendant backstage intrigues, we swiftly find ourselves in the self-generated whirlwind of Gideon’s life. He’s beset on all sides by pressures from past and present lovers, a neglected preteen daughter who craves his attention, producers demanding accountability for the dollars they’ve entrusted to him and various sycophants seeking to hitch their fortune to his obvious success. Little do any but those most intimately connected to Joe suspect just how fragile the focus of their attention actually turns out to be. Gideon is on the fast track to oblivion, as a few decades of hard living fueled by nicotine, booze and amphetamines takes its inevitable toll on his body and psyche. Still, it’s not enough to slow down or temper Joe’s ambitions – he just ups the dosage and blasts on through, led by his impulses and instincts to do whatever it will take to chart the next routine, seduce the nubile dancer eager to gain a casting advantage or brush off the flunky dispatched by his producer to bring the show back under budget and on time. Between his almost continuous blur of activities and obligations, Gideon finds his alone time increasingly disrupted by the increasingly hard-to-ignore presence of Angelique, a beautiful otherworldly messenger played by Jessica Lange in her second screen role (after her memorable debut in the 1976 remake of
King Kong). She’s a guardian of a post-mortal realm that Joe has been pondering for most of his life and now senses is drawing nearer than ever. Functioning as part Grim Reaper, part Fairy Godmother, Angelique is basically on the scene to help Joe make his final reckoning, if not quite reconciliation, with all the busted up relationships that trail behind him after his 50-odd years of life so far.
Fosse’s method of telling the story is that of a rapidly-cut phantasmagoria, alternating between unvarnished rehearsal sequences that show the creative process stripped of its glamour and focused on the grit, scenes of domestic clashes where Gideon is forced to come to terms with the heartaches and disappointments caused by his infidelities and vain ambitions, and the swirl of memories and fantasies that have fueled his drive to project himself as something other than the wretched fake and failure that he views himself as when left alone with his thoughts. It’s a supremely potent, enthralling mix, loaded with an abundance of psychological symbolism that reveals new layers of creative intelligence through multiple viewings, once our astonishment at the sheer energetic power of the performances has settled into a degree of relative comfort and familiarity.
Running just a bit over two hours,
All That Jazz divides up neatly into four distinctive half-hour segments. The first quarter of the film simply establishes the pace and setting of the film, acclimating us to some of the mysteries yet to be revealed without stopping too long to explain the more puzzling moments he casually tosses in. Once we’ve discovered what a scoundrel Gideon is, and the kinds of pressures he’s operating under, the second quarter reveals his creative rebellion as he reinterprets a banal standard Broadway production number into an astonishing eruption of “Air-otica” that, among other distinguishing attributes, “loses the family audience”.
The second hour of the film shifts the focus from Joe’s work life, which is becoming increasingly banal and unfulfilling despite the creative challenges it poses, to his domestic sphere, where the needs of his current lover Kate and daughter Michelle belatedly start receiving more of his attention. They capture his gaze (and ours) by virtue of an adorable dance routine they perform on the stairs and floor of the home they share. It’s a welcome humanizing moment for Gideon and his clan, but the tranquility is short-lived. As the pressure of bad reviews of his latest film production (about a stand-up comedian modeled after Lenny Bruce) break through the insulation of happy talk that his agent tries to maintain around him, Joe’s heart begins to give out on him, leading to one of the most brutally jarring intrusions ever seen (before or since) in the musical comedy genre. We’re ushered into a different kind of theater, that of the surgical variety, in order to get a brief but raw glimpse at open heart surgery. I well remember how shocking and unprecedented that scene was when I saw the film in the winter of 1980. Cinema has made such images a lot more commonplace and quite a bit less unsettling since then, but it’s still powerful stuff, seeing an actual human chest split open simply for the sake of our entertainment... and maybe a note of forewarning.
The final half-hour of
All That Jazz fully lives up to just about any praise bestowed on the film, in my opinion. It’s a full-fledged eruption of Fosse/Gideon’s psyche, the portrayal of all the guilt, fear, cynicism, aspiration, creative genius and desperate clutching after life’s elusive pleasures that has accrued in his twisted and fragmented soul over the course of a lifetime. Played out as a tacky yet superbly realized showstopping production number starring that quintessential showman of the late 1970s Ben Vereen, Gideon himself takes center stage, putting Roy Scheider’s acting (read: dancing) talents to their supreme test as he channels the angst and inner tumult that Fosse wrote into the character of his alter-ego. A bit of cinematic and editing sleight of hand helped Scheider get through the scenes with his credibility intact, but even if he had tripped and stumbled a bit, there’s so much going on in this last stretch that I doubt many viewers would have noticed. Between the ingenious subversion of the Everly Brothers’
Bye Bye Love, the garish costumes and set designs and the audacious, absurd theatricalization of a dying man’s final moments on Earth, this extended scene holds up extraordinarily well over repeat viewings, provided one has a taste for fatalistic humor of a bitterly bleak vintage.
This is a film I saw several times as a young adult in its original theatrical run, leaving a big impression on me over the years.Though most of the details from those initial viewings had faded from my memory over the subsequent years, the powerful impressions remained and I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest by the return visit.
- David Blakeslee, Criterion Cast, 1 September 2014.
RESTORATION:
Undertaken by Twentieth Century Fox and the Academy Film Archive in collaboration with The Film Foundation, this new 4K digital restoration was produced from the original camera negative at Sony Colorworks in Culver City, California. The original 3.0 surround soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from a magnetic track at Chace Audio by Deluxe in Burbank, California.
Everything, from definition and clarity to image depth and contrast stability, is vastly superior when one compares the Blu-ray with earlier releases of this legendary film. Particularly impressive are the improvements during the dream sequences. Now the visuals have the special lightness intended by Giuseppe Rotunno that was impossible to recreate earlier. There are absolutely no traces of problematic degraining corrections or sharpening adjustments. Image stability is outstanding. Finally, there are no cuts, debris, damage marks, dirt, or stains to report.All in all, this is a fantastic presentation of
All That Jazz which will surely remain the definitive presentation of the film
I am every bit as impressed with the audio restoration. Depth and especially clarity are vastly superior, making the viewing experience so much more satisfying. The lossless treatment can be easily felt throughout the entire film. Even seemingly ordinary sequences, such as the one where the sick Joe Gideon chats with the janitor in the hospital sounds better. There are no pops, cracks, background hiss, audio dropouts, or distortions to report in this review.
- adapted from Dr. Svet Atanasov, Blu-ray.com, 3 September 2014.
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