Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THAT JAZZ Directed by Bob Fosse Screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur and Bob Fosse
Nowhere is the director's artistic schizophrenia more apparent or disturbing than in All That Jazz, a highly personal film that swings wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous. For half its length, Jazz is a knowing and witty tour of high-powered show biz, with Fosse as the guide. The film's hero, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), is a driven director-choreographer who not only looks like Fosse but also shares his personal and professional history. As Gideon rehearses a new musical that recalls Chicago and edits a new movie that resembles Lenny, he carries on harried...
...Gwen Verdon and the real-life Reinking. The hero's artistic associates are scabrous caricatures of past Fosse collaborators. Through a series of gritty backstage scenes and razor-sharp dance numbers, these players dramatize all the tensions, hard work and neuroses of idiosyncratic, inveterate show people. In Jazz's spectacular opening sequence, a Broadway audition, Fosse even creates his own capsule version of A Chorus Line...
Though Scheider is a wry, sensitive actor, he soon gets lost in the vulgar theatrics. So does the subject of death. When Fosse attempts to put his heart on the table, he does so too literally. All That Jazz contains close-ups of open-heart sur gery, but few insights into Gideon's soul. What Fosse regards as self-analysis often comes out as egomaniacal self-congratulation: there's even a scene where Gideon cries at his own funeral. Still, Fosse is no fool, and at times he is his own best critic. All That Jazz is never...
...Unmarried Woman went further by trying to spread a new, liberated feminine ideal to a mass audience. Since then, there has been a benign backlash: a series of circumspect films about sensitive, unmarried men. Woody Allen's Manhattan and Bob Fosse's forthcoming All That Jazz are both, in part, self-lacerating accounts of heroes who toy with women to satisfy selfish neurotic needs. Blake Edwards' hit "10" is a touching farce that punctures the childish sexual fantasies of a male-menopause victim. In Starting Over, Burt Reynolds turns from a newly liberated wife to an equally...