SummaryDirector/choreographer Bob Fosse tells his own life story as he details the sordid life of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing, drug-using dancer.
SummaryDirector/choreographer Bob Fosse tells his own life story as he details the sordid life of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing, drug-using dancer.
An actor of great integrity, Scheider at last makes the powerful impression we've been waiting for; he plays Joe with wonderfully delicate and telling detail. You see all the lusts and weaknesses, but you see also an underlying sweetness, a kind of forlorn and desperate innocence that makes something deeply human out of good, bad, weakness, strength, triumph, defeat and all that jazz. [24 Dec 1979, p.78]
Bob Fosse’s half-confession about what a jerk he was to the women in his life may pull a lot of punches, but there’s just too much art on the screen to completely disregard the effort.
All That Jazz is great-looking but not easy to watch; Fosse's indulgent vision at times approaches sour self-loathing, and nothing like the explicit open-heart surgery had been seen on mainstream American screens, let alone the morbid song-and-dance routines in an operating theater.
By the time the film is over, the movie has degenerated with a jaundiced vengeance. Fosse's sour, grandstanding cynicism imposed an intolerable burden of self-pity on his talent, our compassion and the tradition of the backstage muscial.
The jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.