All that Jazz (1979)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) OK, all right, I was wrong. I was wrong to think of Bob Fosse as the single worst thing to happen to musicals in the 1970s. I was wrong to think, after Sweet Charity and Cabaret, that he singlehandedly killed the fun bouncy old-school Hollywood musical. Well, actually, the jury may be out on that last one—but my point is that All that Jazz isn’t just a depressing musical about death; it’s also a masterpiece. It sums up Fosse’s own life, roars with energy from one number to the next, boasts some terrific editing and actually has something fairly profound to say through the form of a musical. Semi-autobiographical, it’s a film about a chain-smoking, womanizing, cardiac writer-director who falls apart as he oversees editing on his last film and puts together a big ambitious Broadway show. The parallels with Fosse’s life during Lenny/Chicago are obvious, but All that Jazz also portends how Fosse would die of a heart attack not even a decade later. It’s not worth dancing around the spoilers here, especially given how the death of the main character is the point around which the entire film revolves—nothing makes sense thematically without it. For a movie about death, All that Jazz is surprisingly lively: the musical numbers are often upbeat, the rapid-fire editing gives life to the result and Roy Schneider is nothing short of astonishing as Fosse’s alter ego. It features some of Fosse’s best screen cinematography: “All That Jazz” is terrific, “Airotica” hilariously transgressive and “Bye Bye Life” caps it all off with an audience-slapping final shot. Let’s not discount the look at Broadway as well: the opening audition sequence is merciless, and the discussion about how to make money off a dying director is ultra-dark comedy. All that Jazz isn’t perfect (the third act drags, in classic Broadway fashion), but in retrospect it puts Fosse’s entire life and work in focus. It’s also a rare example of a downbeat modernistic 1970s musical that actually works for me—I truly expected to hate the film when I started watching it, and was a true fan by the end of it.