Barnes & Noble

All That Jazz is Bob Fosse’s answer to Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ -- an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a womanizing, pill-popping, chain-smoking Broadway director whose self-destructive habits land him in the hospital with a heart attack. The film is as messy and self-indulgent as its hero, yet compelling even today in its inventiveness, daring, and sheer chutzpah. Roy Scheider portrays Fosse stand-in Joe Gideon, a workaholic who struggles to finish a film and stage a new Broadway show while juggling an ex-wife (Leland Palmer), a girlfriend (Fosse's real-life paramour, Ann Reinking), a daughter (Erzebet Foldi), and innumerable one-night stands. The only real happiness he derives is from his work, which he pursues with maniacal devotion. He cheats on, lies to, and genuinely disappoints all the women in his life, yet they remain by his side -- not only because he is a true creative genius but also because, as played by Scheider, Gideon has enough self-awareness, and self-loathing, to make him sympathetic. This notion of the tortured artist is hardly a new one; what makes All That Jazz original and fascinating is the way Fosse, the ultimate showman, deconstructs the musical, digging for the dirt beneath the showbiz glitter and brandishing his trademark razzle-dazzle in the service of something darker. He takes us inside Gideon’s tormented psyche as he is wooed by an ethereal and seductive Angel of Death (Jessica Lange, another Fosse girlfriend) and then onto the operating table, intercutting gruesomely realistic shots of Gideon’s open-heart surgery with glitzy song-and-dance routines addressing the failures of his life and his inevitable slide toward death. It’s hard to imagine a film with such a genuinely experimental approach and downbeat ending receiving recognition from the Academy today, but All That Jazz won seven Oscars. Like Martin Scorsese’s criminally underrated New York, New York, this flawed but ambitious work attempts to reimagine the feel-good musical for a more cynical and knowing era. Kryssa Schemmerling

All Movie Guide

"It's showtime!" In this part film à clef, part musical phantasmagoria, director/choreographer Bob Fosse takes a Felliniesque look at the life of a driven entertainer. Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider, channeling Fosse) is the ultimate work (and pleasure)-aholic, as he knocks back a daily dose of amphetamines to juggle a new Broadway production while editing his new movie, not to mention ex-wife Audrey (Leland Palmer), steady girlfriend Kate (Ann Reinking), a young daughter, and various conquests. Joe cannot, however, avoid intimations of mortality from white-clad vision Angelique (Jessica Lange) that lead him to look back at his life as he heads for a near-inevitable coronary and his departure from this mortal coil with the appropriate razzle-dazzle. Taking his cue from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), Fosse moves from realistic dance numbers to extravagant flights of cinematic fancy, as Joe meditates on his life, his women, and his death. Following a similarly dark revisionist vein as Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977), Fosse shows the stiff price that entertaining exacts on entertainers (among other things, he intercuts graphic footage of open-heart surgery with a song and dance), mercilessly reversing the feel-good mood of classical movie musicals. Critics praised Fosse's daring even as they damned his self-indulgence, while Scheider was lauded for giving the best performance of his career. Though not a disastrous failure, All That Jazz came nowhere near the popularity of 1978's Grease, as late '70s audiences increasingly turned away from "difficult" movies. For all its excesses, Fosse's fiercely personal approach turned All That Jazz into another striking work from one of the few directors able to make, and experiment with, movie musicals after the 1960s. Lucia Bozzola

Product Details

• UPC: 024543434795
• Source: 20TH CENTURY FOX
• Region Code: 1
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Editions: Special Edition, Subtitled, Dubbed
• Time: 2:03:00
• Sales Rank: 2,099

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• The Fox-MGM Hollywood Musicals Collection

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