Bob Fosse’s film about a director dancing himself into the grave is vain, brilliant and often hard to like, and it is one of the few films about show business that knows exactly what the business costs. Roy Scheider carries it on a cigarette and a cough.
Bob Fosse made Cabaret in 1972 and Lenny in 1974, and then he made a film about a man called Joe Gideon who has just made a film about a comedian and is now staging a Broadway musical while his heart gives out. He has changed the names and almost nothing else. All That Jazz is a confession dressed as a musical, and it is one of the best things Fosse did. It is also exhausting, self-regarding and about twenty minutes too pleased with itself, and we would still recommend it.
The opening tells you what kind of film you are in. Hundreds of dancers audition in a theatre to “On Broadway”, and Alan Heim cuts them down to a dozen in a few minutes, so that we watch a room of hope become a room of rejection without a line of dialogue. Heim then builds the film around a refrain: Gideon’s morning routine, the pills, the drops, the shower, the mirror, “It’s showtime, folks”, repeated until it stops being a joke. Giuseppe Rotunno lights the rehearsal halls in plain grey daylight and the dressing room where Gideon talks to Angelique in a soft white haze, so that we always know which world we are in. Nobody has to explain who the woman in the veil is.
The centrepiece of the first half is a backers’ showing of a number called “Take Off With Us”. It begins as a cheery airline jingle, and then Gideon rebuilds it as a sweaty, near-naked orgy in half-light, with Ralph Burns’s arrangement slowing to a pulse and Albert Wolsky’s costumes reduced to almost nothing. We squirmed, frankly; it goes on, and it means to. Then Fosse cuts to the producers watching it, and their faces are so stricken that we laughed out loud and felt better. That is the film in one scene: it shows you the thing, and then it shows you what the thing costs the people who paid for it.
Scheider is the reason it holds. He plays Gideon with a goatee, a cigarette that is never out and a cough he keeps pretending not to hear, and he never once asks us to like the man. He is charming to dancers because it is quicker than being honest with them, and he knows it. Lange plays Angelique as a woman who has heard all his excuses before and is fond of him anyway. Reinking’s Kate and Palmer’s Audrey get the film’s best small moments, two women who have both been let down by him and have compared notes.
The scene that got at us is a quiet one. Kate and the young Michelle rehearse a dance for Gideon in his flat to “Everything Old Is New Again”, with no set, no lighting effects and no audience but him, and Foldi and Reinking are so clearly delighted to be dancing that we found ourselves moved before we had worked out why. It is the only number in the film that nobody is selling anything with. Gideon watches it and, for once, says the right thing.
The faults are real. Gorman’s Davis Newman does a routine about the five stages of dying, and the film plays it back so many times, in so many cuts, that it stops being clever and starts being homework. The second half moves into a hospital and slows badly; the fantasy sequences get bigger and the film gets smaller. And Fosse cannot help forgiving himself. Every woman Gideon has wronged turns up to say she loved him anyway, which may be true and is certainly convenient. Philip Rosenberg and Tony Walton’s sets are handsome throughout, but the late ones exist mainly to give the director a large room to be sorry in.
Critics have never agreed about this film, and the split is honest: what one viewer sees as candour another sees as a man filming his own eulogy. We lean towards candour, because Fosse puts the vanity on screen and lets us watch it kill him. Cabaret was about other people; this is about the one person he never managed to direct.
See it in a cinema if one will have it, because the audition needs a big room. It runs 123 minutes, carries a 15, and the music will stay in the head for a week whether wanted or not.
