I recently re-watched ALL THAT JAZZ which, apparently, was Stanley Kubrick’s favourite movie back in 1979… High praise indeed!
(Hat tip to Zsófia Tálas for introducing me to this film which I’d not seen up until a few years ago.)
Now, I don’t really like musicals. I used to say I only liked three musicals: CABARET, TOMMY and THE WIZARD OF OZ. CABARET, of course, was directed by Bob Fosse and ALL THAT JAZZ is a poison pen letter sent by Bob to himself. It’s full of self-loathing. Roy Scheider plays “Joe Gideon”, a thinly disguised self-portrait by Bob Fosse. Joe is a choreographer who is staging a Broadway play and editing a Hollywood movie in the evenings. He’s running on empty, using speed, booze and cigarettes to power his way through the day, teetering on the brink of a physical and mental collapse. In real life Fosse was directing Chicago and editing LENNY, the Dustin Hoffmann movie he made about the boundary-breaking comedian Lenny Bruce. He was overworked and stressed to the point where he had a massive heart attack and open heart surgery. ALL THAT JAZZ is about his close encounter with The Grim Reaper… and it’s a work of genius.
There’s a tiny category of films which I’m an absolute sucker for: brilliant directors who hate (and paradoxically, secretly, love) themselves. In this category I’d include:
- Fellini’s 8 1/2
- Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ
- Innaritu’s BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS
(There’s another similar-but-different category of directors doing their childhoods – for me Cuarón’s ROMA is the best of those.)
An aside: BARDO has very poor visual effects in places (i.e. the new born baby near the beginning), but please don’t let that put you off, it’s a fascinating film. For some reason nobody talks about it, I rarely meet people who’ve seen it. I heard a rumour that it was shot during Covid and broke the safety protocols, so Netflix didn’t promote it properly, they decided to bury it. No idea if that’s true… Anyway, you can still find it on Netflix. I hope in years to come people will re-discover it.
What I love about ALL THAT JAZZ, and to a lesser extent CABARET and Fosse’s musical with Shirley Maclaine, SWEET CHARITY — is the editing. It’s fast and precise, but also at times it juxtaposes shots and scenes and sounds from different times and places. It’s a kind of associative editing style that comes from emotion and feeling, not straightforward storytelling. Almost a fever dream, a hallucinatory feeling. Nic Roeg used to edit like this in a lot of his films, for example THE MAN THAT FELL TO EARTH or DON’T LOOK NOW. It’s a different kind of cinematic language that was in vogue in the seventies, and in the hands of a bona fide artist like Bob Fosse, it’s fascinating. It reminds me of the way our thoughts tumble randomly from one thing to another, a free association of ideas.
(Alan Heim won an Oscar and a BAFTA for the editing — very well deserved.)
I love how the film looks death in the eye. It’s joyful and terrifying at the same time, simultaneously. Fosse is scared shitless of dying — but he’s also got a great sense of humour, a child’s sense of fun and play, too.
He’s smiling, right to the very end…
It also happens to be Margaret Qualley’s favourite movie…
