All That Jazz (1979)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

All That Jazz (1979) – B. Fosse

Musical theatre and dance aren’t really my thing, so some of director/choreographer Bob Fosse’s epic and excoriating paean to himself was probably lost on me.  But it is epic and not unrelated to Fellini’s 8 ½, which also took the director’s own life as a starting place for an extended fantasy/nightmare.  Roy Scheider is the surprising lead (surprising because he never seemed like a song-and-dance man to me) and he pulls off the chain-smoking, speed-taking, rascally irresponsible promiscuous character just fine, including the singing/dancing finale.  I’ll admit that the film drags at times:  I had more than enough of the clips of Cliff Gorman playing Lenny Bruce riffing on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of death, a scene from the movie (presumably Lenny, 1974) that Gideon/Fosse is editing while also getting a Broadway show together.  Of course, death is a main theme here because Fosse had been warned that his was being hastened by heart problems (presumably brought on by his lifestyle; he eventually died of a heart attack in 1987).  The film maintains a reasonably linear trajectory but bounces in and out of reality, presumably lingering in Gideon/Fosse’s thoughts or even perhaps in the immediate anticipated afterlife (where Jessica Lange plays an angel) and dance sequences are liberally spread throughout, culminating in that finale.  You don’t feel that the musical setpieces interrupt the story – they _are_ the story – and Fosse had the balls to make them his story.