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Bob Fosse on All That

Jazz

All That Jazz: Stardust

By Hilton Als

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present for your delectation the American
director Bob Fosse, dead
for more than twenty-five years now but living
on in a series of works that are so remarkable in
their individuality and vision that it is not unusual to feel, while watching any number of the shows
he conceived for the stage, or any number of his deeply imaginative motion pictures, that one is,
still, in the presence of an actual living, breathing person, restless and contemporary, a body that

is like one long sentence filled with ideas about sex, ideas about women, ideas about cinema and
entertainment and guilta sentence that could have gone on and on were it not for Bob Fosses
actual body betraying the artist one day in 1987, when he was in Washington, D.C., working on a
revival of Sweet Charity, a musical he had choreographed and directed on Broadway twenty
years before.
It was like a movie deathor a movie death as conceived by Bob Fosse. There was the sixtyyear-old choreographer, balding and probably smoking, and there was his confidante and muse,
Gwen Verdon (theyd married in 1960, eventually separated, but never divorced), cradling him as
his body started to fail, and kept failing, the victim of a fatal heart attack. While that death was the
end of Fosses body and working life, it was just the start of what one might call the Fosse rip-off,
as in certain parts of Rob Marshalls 2002 film Chicago, which features one dancer made up to
look like Verdon, while others strike Fosse-like poses in a backstage world Fosse described first
and indeliblya sphere shaped by always exciting wrongdoing.
In any case, Fosses imitators are legion; thats what happens when you give your life to learning
something about your own ultimately unexplainable genius. It must have seemed as though no

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3275-all-that-jazz-stardust[08/09/2014 10:55:12 a.m.]

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All That Jazz: Stardust - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

time had passed, as he lay dying, between that moment and being a boy in Chicago, a born
choreographer who worked so hard to articulate, through all those bodies that passed before his
discerning, worried eyes, what a
shrug meant, what a slide meant, how to contract and then
extend in a world that was constantly contracting and extending past the pointseeminglyof
human endurance, all the while holding up
your gloved hands, those famous Fosse hands, ten
digits that, more often than not, the choreographer made look like the instruments that committed
original sin, hands that were always grasping for something more dangerous than love, even
though there is nothing more dangerous than love, maybe an attitude, one that said, I dont care,

fuck it. This kind of deliberate carelessness can certainly look very cool, especially in Fosses
hands, but that was just part of his actthe theatricalization of indifferencebecause if you
wiped away a little of his pancake, you could tell that he always cared, all the way back there in
Chicago, where he was born in 1927, a boy who was in love with his fathers brush with show
business, a business his father couldnt handle, and left long before Robert Fosse or Bob or
Bobby was born, but that Fosse, picking up the thread, gave himself to wholeheartedly, as is so
often the way, another case of the father not being able to make it but the son will, and before he

knew it, Bob Fosse was in Show Business. He was barely in his teens, tapping away in white tie
and tails flecked with old, sour makeup, determined to remake his father in a better, more
successful image, determined as he sat in one lousy dressing room after another, prone to tits
and feathers, primed for the big time, his heart cocked to the valiant, sometimes wrecked ladies of
burlesque, because their story was and wasnt his story: they wanted to be seen as much as
Fosse wanted to be seen, tacky heart and all. And to that teenage mind and future directors
mind, those women sporting peeling silver jazz shoes, living on a buck and a wing and a prayer,
symbolized, and would always symbolize, all he knew of the world, itsat timesgraceful
gracefulness and the ways it displayed itself in half-broken footlights, dance routines, memories.
Fosses quick-kick-kick-turn but metaphysically heavy graces appeared in all his movies. They
were there in Paula Kellys and Chita Riveras dance-hall girls in his first film as a director, 1969s
Sweet Charity. They were there in the dancers and all-female band in 1972s Cabaret. They were
there as Valerie Perrines Honey in 1974s Lenny.
And they were there in Ann Reinkings, Leland
Palmers, and
Jessica Langes performances in his most ambitious movie, 1979s All That Jazz.
(Fosses final flick, Star 80,
released in 1983, is his quietest movie, a chamber piece about purity

and image and the violence men can and often do inflict on women when that reassuring gaze is
taken away, the mouth brushed away from the tit.)
Produced and cowritten by Robert Alan Aurthur, All That Jazz is
a world of bodies. We begin with
bodies yearning to be validateddancers auditioning for a spot in a Broadway showeven as
the receptacle of that yearning, the director, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), chips away at his body;
nothing is real for Joe without suffering, especially his own story. Joe wants fantasy to be real, or
he wants the real to be more fantastic, loose, a series of improvised gestures, free of the guilt he
always feels. Part of All That Jazz
takes place in Fosses version of Orpheuss underworld. There,
Gideon talks with, flirts with, and eventually dies in the embrace of Angelique (Jessica Lange), a
blonde angel of death.
The space where Gideon and Angeliquethe film has many religious references, such as Joes
biblical name and Angeliques mythological onedance their dance of death looks like a sort of
abandoned stage set. Its filled with props, old costumes, signs, and flashing lights, the
razzmatazz of showbiz, but
the action here is slower, more contemplative, as we watch the
events of Joes past life being inter-cut with his present-day existence as a director trying to make
a troubled show work, make his relationships work, while simultaneously avoiding and being
attracted to
death as beauty, death as the final curtain and biggest show on earth.
Fosse films Angelique through a series of veilsillusory curtains that contrast beautifully with
Reinkings open face, and Palmers. As the directors girlfriend and former wife but always muse
and artistic partner, respectively, the women struggle to tell Joe the truth, even as they sometimes
struggle not to face the truth of their love for him. The why of their love hangs in the air between
their open faces and Joes face, even as, in one fantasy sequence, he directs them in miniextravaganzas that comment, a trifle too ironically, on their relationship to him, or his to the truth.
But its easy to forgive Fosse this kind of indulgence, because, well,
thats showbiz too making
small moments big, and being dazzled by ones own legitimate interest in creating a world filled,
in frame after frame, with shine.
Fosses genius was not limited to, though it was largely about,
how to join theater to film. While
Orson Welles worked in that territory too, Fosses focus was the body, and how it affects the mind
and eye, whereas Welles was interested in the plasticity of nearly everything, including words
(hed made his living as a radio actor
for years before he put Citizen Kane together). By centering
on the body, Fosse had such amazing source materialthe drama was in a
step, a look, a
gesture. His cinema grew out of that; the films he made
before All That Jazz were like no others,
but its in this
film, a kind of moral-minded, autobiographical phantasmagoria, that Fosse learned

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3275-all-that-jazz-stardust[08/09/2014 10:55:12 a.m.]

summer introduced Belle de jour

as a guest programmer on TCM -that Bunuel (sorry, can't find the
diacritical marks on my new . . .
Chantale Reve on Belle de jour:
Tough Love,
about 11 hours ago.

Some insight to Stanley Kubrick's

work process outside the
editing
room...in the business office
where he was just as . . .
Tim Deegan on Repertory Pick:
Kubrick in Berkeley,
about 12 hours ago.

This is by far my most favorite

movie~ HOPSCOTCH!, and it has
my most favorite actor~ Walter
Matthau, and the DVD is from The
Criterion Collection~ one of the
highest quality and respected . . .
WalterMatthau01 on Hopscotch,
about 14 hours ago.

Man, I love flipping through and

reading Criterion's old Laserdisc
essays. Now if only they actually
archived the laserdiscs

themselves! That would be lovely.

Something on Seven,
about 16 hours ago.

Criterion NEEDS to do Pulp

Fiction again. Maybe with a

commentary by Mr. Tarantino

himself plus maybe even a
chronological edit
like for
Following or Sony's 2-Disc DVD of
Memento.
Something on Pulp Fiction,
about 16 hours ago.

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All That Jazz: Stardust - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

to make the camera dance too. He treats it as another body, one that sometimes sits silently
while the performers perform moments of show-business-scaled intimacy (as in the lovely pas de
deux between Reinking and Erzsebet Foldi, as Joes daughter, to the sweet Peter Allen song)
and other times gets wrapped up in the action itself, as when Gideon films the ladies in his life
wrapped up in all those feathers, gloves, and regret. In the latter scene, the camera glides along
with, or looks up at, the action, and then cuts back to Gideon, hooked up to a lot of hospital

apparatussurvival as a show. Some may think of this

extravaganza as directorial selfindulgence, a little too much about Fosse the man, that lover of women and showbiz, that striver
who never felt he was good enough, a little too much Fellini 8 12 influence, but who hasnt had
their head opened by that movie? In any case, how can you think of All That Jazz
as being selfindulgent when Fosse is so happy to take the piss out of himself? Its part of what made him such
a witty filmmakerthe joke was on him, and some other people too. During that dance/hospital
scene, Fosse has the script girl say Gideons line for him because hes on a respirator. She does
so in the most
deadpan manner possible, and you laugh because its funny, and because its true:
show business is about repetition that leads to
per- formance; her dead reading is as dead as
an almost dead Joe Gideon.
Like most visual and physical artists, Fosse revered language (his closest friends were writers),
and I think he handled text as well as, if not better than, anyone out there. (Mariel Hemingways
scenes with Eric Roberts in Star 80 are especially powerful because of the directors ear for
nuance, the moments in which something should be said but cant be, especially among the

inarticulate.) In All That Jazz, his marriage of text with image reaches that rare synthesis where
a movie is no less cinematic because of its verbal strengths; indeed, Fosse uses talk as another
element of sound in the film. Sometimes we hear voices but dont see the speaker, as Gideon
goes about his mad, sweet business. This includes editing a movie called The Stand-up, which
stars Cliff Gorman, who played Lenny Bruce onstage. Indeed, the subject of All That Jazz
is, as
much as anything else, the technical aspect of filmmaking. Interspersed with scenes of Gideon at
workhe only plays once, and thats with his daughter; he doesnt use sex as a release so
much as a way to connect with a potential muse, the better to understand his work we hear the

sound of looping on The Stand-up and the filmed audience in that work, aural gestures that
comment on Gideons real and unreal life. These are among many such counterpoints throughout
the film, a metawork about movie-making, making believe, making something out of nothing. No,
not nothing. A movie made out of Fosse whole, alive and dying, testifying hard and joyously about
the artists most profound assetthe imagination.
Hilton Als is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include The Women and White Girls. This
essay Hilton Als.

Film Essays

Posted on August 25, 2014

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ALL THAT JAZZ

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2 comments
By Ian C Carter
August 28, 2014
06:32 PM

I love you, Mr Als. You too, Criterion.

Reply

By high-by-noon

Was Fosse a Bergman character? Maybe Bergman was a Fosse

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3275-all-that-jazz-stardust[08/09/2014 10:55:12 a.m.]

All That Jazz: Stardust - From the Current - The Criterion Collection
August 29, 2014
05:53 PM

character.

Reply

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