Roy Scheider
In 1974, director-choreographer Bob Fosse was editing Lenny, his first film since winning an Oscar (watch here) for Cabaret, and staging Chicago, a Broadway musical starring his estranged wife Gwen Verdon. To keep pace, he was popping Dexedrine and ignoring troubling health warnings. Shortly after rehearsals for the musical began, he suffered a massive heart attack. Both productions were put on hold while Fosse recuperated from open-heart surgery. The film (whose title is from a song in the musical) is a semi-autobiographical fantasy about that experience. Fosse explained, “I became very interested in death and hospital behavior, and the meaning of life and death.”
Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is a pill-popping, cigarette-smoking, sex-addicted director who is editing the Hollywood film The Stand-up while staging the Broadway musical NY/LA, which stars Joe’s ex-wife Audrey (Leland Palmer). Ann Reinking was more or less playing herself as Joe’s girlfriend Kate, as was Cliff Gorman, who won a Tony Award for playing Lenny Bruce onstage but lost the film role to Dustin Hoffman. That’s the semi-autobiographical part of the film. The fantasy part is the hallucinated nightclub scenes where Joe talks with — and flirts with — Angelique (Jessica Lange), a blonde angel of death.
As in Fosse’s final two musicals, the score primarily features cover songs, including the opening “On Broadway” montage (watch here) and the “Bye Bye Life” finale from the early rock era. The one notable exception is the show-stopping and eye-popping production number for NY/LA, “Take Off with Us” (watch here), written by Stan Lebowsky and Fred Tobias (who wrote the score for the short-lived 1970 Broadway musical Gantry).
Reviews were largely positive. New York Times critic Vincent Canby called the film “an uproarious display of brilliance, nerve, dance, maudlin confessions, inside jokes and, especially, ego,” while Variety described it as “a self-important, egomaniacal, wonderfully choreographed, often compelling film.” Director Stanley Kubrick, who is mentioned in the movie, reportedly called it the “best film I think I have ever seen.”
It won the Palme d’Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival and nine Oscar nominations (including picture), winning four, including score (Ralph Burns). The film would be the last musical nominated for Best Picture until Beauty and the Beast in 1991 and the last live-action musical until Moulin Rouge! in 2001.
In 2001, All That Jazz was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. In 2006, it ranked #14 on the American Film Institute’s list of Greatest Movie Musicals.
Listen to the soundtrack, then look for the film (which unfortunately isn’t available for streaming). For more about the making of the film, read Sam Wasson’s Fosse (2013), which was adapted for the miniseries Fosse/Verdon (2019).
NEXT, explore Fame (1980), another unflinching look at the hardships of life in the theater, with a score featuring the Oscar-winning title song (watch here) by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford.
THEN, look behind the scenes of the country music business in the Oscar-nominated Nashville (1975), with a score featuring the Oscar-winning song “I’m Easy” (watch here), by Keith Carradine.