All That Jazz - Music Edition
by Bob Fosse
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Ann Reinking, Ben Vereen, Cliff Gorman, Jessica Lange, Roy ScheiderDirector: Bob Fosse
Brand: Fox
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Spanish (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 123 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-04-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of All That Jazz - Music Edition
Movie Review: Life and Death On The Great White Way
Summary: 5 Stars
Bob Fosse's 1979 ALL THAT JAZZ is perhaps most famous for the extreme reaction it provokes: you either love it or you hate it. There is no middle ground.
Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is a celebrated stage and film director famous for creating dance numbers with a super sexy style--and truly chaotic professional and personal life. Even as he edits a film he has recently directed, he begins rehearsals for a new Broadway show. Even as he duels with his acidic show-biz ex-wife over the needs of their daughter, he cheats on his girl friend with any lovely chorus girl who wants to fall across his bed. He goes from crisis to crisis in a round of late nights fueled by nicotine, caffine, alcohol, and drugs--and he loves every ego-gratifying moment of it. What he does not love is the heart attack he has in the middle of it all.
What divides viewers is not so much the plot as the overall style of the film. Like Joe Gideon, Bob Fosse (1927-1987) was most famous for his musicals, which were often akin to beautiful but distinctly dark hallucinations of super-stylized motion showing lots of skin. With ALL THAT JAZZ, Fosse takes his unique, highly surrealistic musical style and combines it with the similarly surrealistic approach of such master directors as Fellini. The result is a film that shifts between past, present, and future with glittering musical numbers that leap from the mind of Gideon himself to make wry comment on his egocentric madness--and in which beautiful show girls become the personification of death.
As Joe Gideon, Roy Scheider (perhaps best known for his tough-cop role in THE FRENCH CONNECTION) truly gives the performance of his career; he is amazing in the role of the driven, egocentric director/choreographer who will stop at nothing to pursue his desires, professional or otherwise. The film also gives us two performers who rarely appear on screen: Leland Palmer as Gideon's ex-wife Audrey Paris (a role based on Gwen Verdon) and Ann Rhineking as Gideon's long-suffering dancer-girlfried Kate Jagger (a role, ironically, based on herself.) Both prove extremely memorable--as does Ben Vereen, a performer I do not usually like, appearing here in as the emcee of Gideon's final and most memorable hallucination.
The cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is sharp, clean, disquieting, and manages to convey the New York of the late 1970s in remarkable detail; the editing by Alan Heim (who also worked on such memorable films as NETWORK and STAR 80) is also memorable. Indeed, be it lighting, costumes, casting, or overall art design it is virtually impossible to fault the film at any level. Even so--ALL THAT JAZZ remains as likely to divide viewers today as it did in 1979. Movie musicals have changed a great deal over the past decade or so, but ALL THAT JAZZ remains a unique offering. You either get it or you don't; you either like it or you hate it.
There are at least two DVDs on the market. One is a no-frills edition with a good transfer; the other offers several bells and whistles that fans of the film will enjoy. Recommended in either version.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Summary of All That Jazz - Music Edition
ALL THAT JAZZ MUSIC EDITION - DVD MovieChoreographer-turned-director Bob Fosse (Cabaret, Lenny) turns the camera on himself in this nervy, sometimes unnerving 1979 feature, a nakedly autobiographical piece that veers from gritty drama to razzle-dazzle musical, allegory to satire. It's an indication of his bravura, and possibly his self-absorption, that Fosse (who also cowrote the script) literally opens alter ego Joe Gideon's heart in a key scene--an unflinching glimpse of cardiac surgery, shot during an actual open-heart procedure.
Roy Scheider makes a brave and largely successful leap out of his usual romantic lead roles to step into Gideon's dancing pumps, and supplies a plausible sketch of an extravagant, self-destructive, self-loathing creative dynamo, while Jessica Lange serves as a largely allegorical Muse, one of the various women that the philandering Gideon pursues (and usually abandons). Gideon's other romantic partners include Fosse's own protégé (and a major keeper of his choreographic style since his death), Ann Reinking, whose leggy grace is seductive both "onstage" and off.
Fosse/Gideon's collision course with mortality, as well as his priapic obsession with the opposite sex, may offer clues into the libidinal core of the choreographer's dynamic, sexualized style of dance, but musical aficionados will be forgiven for fast-forwarding to cut out the self-analysis and focus on the music, period. At its best--as in the knockout opening, scored to George Benson's strutting version of "On Broadway," which fuses music, dance, and dazzling camera work into a paean to Fosse's hoofer nation--All That Jazz offers a sequence of classic Fosse numbers, hard-edged, caustic, and joyously physical. --Sam Sutherland
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