Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz (’79) is a dazzler in several respects, but it keeps pushing the coy cynicism button…over and over and over. It walks and talks big-city sophistication within a very narrow lane, but it’s essentially aimed at the rubes.
Roy Scheider gave a career-peak performance as Broadway musical director Joe Gideon, whose story was modelled on Fosse’s own in the early ’70s. And yes, Jazz impressed me the first time (the Manhattan press screening was at Cinema 1). But it irked me the second time. When I caught it a third time on DVD (I love the early dance-audition sequence) I quit before the halfway mark. It over-emphasizes to a fault. Parts are ham-fisted and painfully un-hip, but it was quite the film of its day.
“Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease,” wrote critic Dave Kehr. “This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.”
Time‘s then-critic Frank Rich wrote that “as a showman, [Fosse] has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone.”
I interviewed Scheider in late ’81 or ’82 for Us magazine. We met at a coffee shop on Lexington, somewhere in the mid ’70s. He used to go there after his morning run. He was a good egg, an honest cat and a hard worker. Most actors don’t get to flourish with the kind or roles that Scheider was able to land from the early ’70s to the early ’80s.