Directed with a hefty, grinning dose of chuck-it-all, piss-and-vinegar-abandon, Bob Fosse’s All the Jazz is movie magic. Exasperating, nasty, lighting-fast, dark-hearted movie magic but movie magic all the same. Using the framework of a heightened, pseudo-autobiographical narrative with diversions into fantasy and utilizing the trappings of the movie-musical in exciting ways that are rarely ever attempted, this is a sensational piece of storytelling and filmmaking, with Roy Scheider dropping an Atomic Bomb of a performance as a stressed out, over-sexed, over-drugged, loose cannon of a director, a man simultaneously mounting a large-scale Broadway show and putting the editorial touches on his latest movie. Things aren’t going correct with either project, women keep coming and going at the worst of times, and his young daughter clearly needs her father for support. Alan Heim’s frenetic yet coherent editing in this film is spectacular, all jagged patterns that underscore the fragility and hostility of Scheider’s fractured mental and spiritual psyche, while the frenzied, energetic cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno, filled with extreme close-ups and doc-style jitters, added a level of vitality to every single sequence.
Clearly a personal statement about the artistic process and what it can do to the artist in question, this is a film that could only have been made by Fosse, and All the Jazz serves as his celebration of both mediums, film and stage, and as his own cautionary tale for everyone else to follow in his artistic footsteps. This is a film that’s about the rush and excitement of success, about how some people have a burning fire raging inside that can never be extinguished, and because Scheider’s performance is so completely full-throttle at every moment, you get the sense that Fosse found exactly what he was looking for in his choice of leading man. The restoration wizards at The Criterion Collection have done an utterly superb job with their 4K transfer, stripping away any blemishes and pictorial imperfections, but still allowing the Blu-ray disc to have that special, old-school filmic quality that I adore and miss in relation to modern films, which increasingly look less and less like actual movies, and more like video games. The sound pops with clarity and balance, and the special feature line-up is a treasure trove of goodies.
Podcasting Them Softly 