All That Jazz

All That Jazz

Opening Shot

Joe Gideon's morning routine: Visine, Dexedrine, shower, and "It's showtime, folks" into the bathroom mirror. Giuseppe Rotunno's camera watches through the mirror glass, catching the reflection rather than the man. Fosse opens with a performance of functionality. Gideon is constructing a human being out of chemicals and habit, and the film will spend two hours watching that construction collapse.

What It Does

Rotunno shifts between two visual registers. The rehearsal and performance sequences are lit with Fosse's signature top-light, all shadows and silhouettes, bodies reduced to angular shapes. The hospital sequences are fluorescent-white, clinical, the lighting of a body being processed by an institution. The two worlds alternate with increasing speed as Gideon deteriorates, until the final number collapses them into one: a hospital bed as a stage, death as the final performance.

Ralph Burns's arrangements take existing songs (including a devastating use of "Bye Bye Love") and transform them into commentary. The audition sequence set to "On Broadway" is simultaneously a musical number and a power dynamic: Gideon watches women perform for his approval, and Fosse frames himself as both the artist and the predator. The film doesn't separate those identities. It argues they're the same.

Roy Scheider, who was not a dancer and not an obvious choice, is extraordinary. He plays Gideon as a man who has turned self-destruction into an aesthetic practice, who experiences his own dying the way he experiences choreography: as a sequence of physical events he can shape but not stop. The open-heart surgery scene, cross-cut with a fantasy dance number, is Fosse's most audacious sequence. The body on the table and the body on the stage are the same body, and the film watches both with the same clinical fascination.

Why It's on the List

All That Jazz is the most ruthlessly honest autobiographical film ever made. Fosse cast himself as the villain of his own life story, a man who destroys every relationship for the next production, and he did it while recovering from the heart attack that the film depicts. The final sequence, a Vegas-style death number, is Fosse admitting that even his own mortality is material. No other filmmaker has been this unflinching about their own worst instincts.

The Argument Against

Fosse's self-examination can read as self-aggrandizement. Making your own death into a spectacular musical number is either the bravest artistic choice possible or the most narcissistic. The women in the film (Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, Jessica Lange as the angel of death) exist primarily as responses to Gideon's behavior, which means the film replicates the dynamic it's critiquing. Fosse shows you the damage he causes without giving the damaged people their own stories.

Closing Image

Gideon lies in a body bag, zipped shut. The zipper closes over Roy Scheider's face. The last thing you see is the bag being wheeled away under fluorescent lights. "Bye Bye Love" plays. The showman is finished. The show, inevitably, goes on.