All That Jazz (1979)

Official trailer

All That Jazz is Bob Fosse’s 1979 American musical drama autobiographically depicting his own self-destructive working habits while he was editing his 1974 film Lenny and staging the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago. The film fictionalizes Fosse as choreographer-director Joe Gideon. Roy Scheider plays Gideon. Jessica Lange plays Angelique, the angel of death who interviews him. Ann Reinking plays Gideon’s girlfriend Katie. Leland Palmer plays his ex-wife Audrey. Erzsébet Földi plays his daughter Michelle. Cliff Gorman plays comedian Davis Newman in the Lenny stand-in role.

Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse wrote the screenplay. Columbia Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox produced the film on a budget of approximately 12 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 38 million dollars worldwide. The work won four Academy Awards.

All That Jazz floors me. It’s a musical about a man working himself to death, made by the man doing it, and I don’t know another film with that much nerve. Scheider is the best he ever was, and I spent the whole film torn between admiring Gideon and wanting to shake him.

The film is one of the strangest American musicals ever produced by a major studio and the principal artistic achievement of Fosse’s directorial career. Fosse made the film while recovering from open-heart surgery that his self-destructive habits had caused. The work was his second autobiographical film after Lenny. The brutal self-examination, the structural risk of intercutting cabaret numbers with surgical procedures, and the willingness to portray himself as monstrous all distinguish the work from conventional American filmmaking. Scheider received a Best Actor nomination for what remains his career-defining performance.

The result is the rare film that combines musical numbers, autobiography, and meditation on death without diluting any of the three.

The Self-Portrait

Fosse cast Scheider instead of himself. The decision allowed Fosse to direct his own depiction with sufficient distance to make it harsh. Gideon abuses pills. He sleeps with his dancers. He neglects his daughter. He drives his collaborators past the point of usefulness. The film never softens these portrayals or excuses them through artistic temperament arguments. Fosse depicted his own behavior with the lack of self-pity that most autobiographical work can’t manage.

The morning routine sequence opens the film with Gideon medicating himself, putting in Visine eye drops, and looking at himself in the mirror to say it’s showtime, folks. The sequence repeats across the film. Each repetition shows increased exhaustion. The film establishes that the morning ritual is what allows Gideon to function. By the third iteration the audience understands that the ritual is also killing him.

That mirror ritual is my favorite device in the film. Each time it comes back Scheider looks a little more hollowed out, and by the last one I wanted to reach through the screen and take the pills away from him.

The Death Conversations

Lange plays Angelique through scenes set in a soft-lit hospital room where Gideon meets death repeatedly across the film.

The conversations are flirtatious. Gideon charms death the way he’s charmed everyone else in his life. Lange plays Angelique with the patience of a woman who has heard this pitch before from other men with similar habits. The structural choice to make death a romantic figure instead of a punitive one reframes the entire film.

Lange is wonderful here. I think making death a patient, amused woman is the smartest choice in the picture, and her scenes are the ones I’d go back to first.

This distinguishes All That Jazz from conventional treatments of fatal illness. Most films treat death as antagonist. Fosse treats death as audience. Gideon performs for Angelique the way he performs for everyone. The argument the film develops without stating it is that artistic self-presentation doesn’t stop at the moment of death. The performer dies performing.

Bye Bye Life

The closing sequence depicts Gideon’s final cardiac arrest as a spectacular cabaret number titled Bye Bye Life. Ben Vereen performs as the master of ceremonies. The hospital becomes a stage. Gideon’s ex-wife, girlfriend, and daughter appear in the audience. The choreography combines Fosse’s defining vocabulary with literal medical imagery including resuscitation paddles and crash carts. The sequence runs eight minutes.

The choice to end an autobiographical death film with a Broadway production number could have failed catastrophically. The picture works because the film has spent two hours establishing that Gideon experiences everything through performance structures. His death must also be performance. The sequence delivers what conventional dying-artist films can’t achieve. The film gives the protagonist the death he would have wanted while making the audience understand exactly why he was going to die anyway.

Bye Bye Life is the reason this gets a 9. I find it thrilling and horrible at once, a man’s heart giving out while Ben Vereen sells it like opening night, and no ending I know of takes a bigger risk and lands it.

Does All That Jazz still hold up?

It’s a 9. All That Jazz is the strangest musical a major studio ever released and the best thing Fosse directed. The self-portrait is honest enough to hurt, Lange turns death into the best company in the picture, and Bye Bye Life is an ending I’d put against any in American cinema. See it if you care about autobiographical filmmaking, about what an adult musical can do, or about work that studies its own creation.

Frequently Asked Questions