Sight & Sound Top 250 Films
May 22, 2023 - 250-241 (Part Six)
#242 - “All That Jazz” (1979) Bob Fosse
In July of 1981 when I was sixteen years old, my parents sent me to Kingston, New York to do a large-group awareness-training-program called “The Six Day”.
This was part of Werner Erhard’s “est” seminar series — so brilliantly and accurately parodied in Michael Ritchie’s comedy/romance “Semi-Tough”.
I spent almost a week in the mountains of central New York with a bunch of other teens, living in cabins, rappelling down cliffs and sitting in a conference room being yelled at by trainers. It was not a great experience, but I did meet a few cool people, one of whom was a girl named Maximillia.
After the seminar ended, I’d scheduled a week in New York City, staying with friends of my parents. But, due to some kind of scheduling conflict, the details of which I can no longer remember, I found myself suddenly homeless for a night.
So, I went to a phone booth, called Maximillia and asked if I could possibly crash on her couch. After a short discussion with her parents, she said yes and so I went to the upper East Side of Manhattan, past a fancy doorman, up the elevator, down a hallway and into a world I’d never really experienced before, that of the luxury New York apartment circa 1980.
Before my mind could wrap itself around the fabulousness of where I was, Max was leading me towards the kitchen so I could meet her father. And there he was, sitting, smiling, shirtless and reading the New York Times.
And I thought to myself “Wow, he looks just like Roy Scheider.” And then a second later, with a sudden breathtaking chill, I realized that it was Roy Scheider, tan and slender and handsome and kind, right in front of me, holding his hand out for me to shake.
I played it cool. I never mentioned that I knew who he was or that I’d seen “Jaws” twice and “Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York” about a dozen times — it had played twice a day for a whole month on Channel 100, one of the first pay-per-view cable TV channels — I just went to Max’s room to hang out.
That night the whole family went to an event, leaving me all alone in their home. The date was July 29th, 1981 so I sat in Max’s bed with her little dog and watched Diana Spencer marry Prince Charles on TV.
Yes, I snooped, coming across a little black book of phone numbers that included Richard Dreyfuss and Steven Spielberg.
But the highlight of my 24 hours in chez Scheider was early the next morning when I was awoken at dawn by the sight and sound Roy doing exercises.
The couch I had slept on was in a room with a mirror that covered an entire wall and a dance barre. And as I pretended to sleep I watched — through barely opened eyelids — Mr. Scheider going through a series of ballet moves. I could barely breathe, the sight was so intense and beautiful and, frankly, arousing to the sixteen year old version of me.
I had pretty much forgotten this experience from over forty years ago, but it all came rushing back at my first sight of Roy Scheider in 1979’s “All That Jazz”, a movie I’d managed not to see — other than a few clips — until last week.
I’ll admit I did not come to the viewing with clean hands. The milieu it takes place in — the world of the 70’s Broadway musical theatre — is a world I have many conflicting feelings about.
Back then I never missed the Tony Awards on TV. And I invariably bought the soundtrack to the latest musical hit. In our house, we wore out our copies of “A Chorus Line” and “Hair”.
But as I got older, I started to find these old favorite songs of my youth less and less enchanting.
Some of this might have to do with the fact that in college I was cast as Mark in “A Chorus Line” and the experience was so horrible (I was a singer but not a dancer and the exacting, maddening rehearsals which were run by two vets of the original touring company broke my spirit and enraged me) that I henceforth despised every second of Marvin Hamlisch’s score.
I experienced a similar disillusionment with the work of Stephen Sondheim. There was a time when I knew every word to the musical “Sunday in the Park with George.” Now I’d leave the room if somebody tried to play a single song from it.
I don’t mean to imply that my musical taste has improved, just that it’s changed, the upshot being that I no longer consider myself the right audience for the particular brand of ‘razzle-dazzle’ earnestness that musical theatre traffics in.
This is a long way of saying that my impressions of “All That Jazz” must be seen through the lens of someone who is no longer predisposed to accept the specific charms of its subject matter. I suffer from a low tolerance for the broad, declamatory, performative insistence of large scale theatre. It’s just not my vibe.
The first half of the movie is great, if a little ‘inside baseball’. The second half gets bogged down in repetitious and not particularly subtle musings on death.
And I couldn’t help but think of Woody Allen’s 1975 comedy “Love and Death” which traffics in the same themes and philosophical arguments, but manages to deal with ‘the grim reaper’ in under two minutes while also making us laugh.
And then there’s the music, which, aside from George Benson’s version of “On Broadway” didn’t really work for me. As I said before...this is not a world I understand: I saw “Cats,” at the Schubert Theatre in the 90’s and I’m still shaking my head with disbelief.
And, seriously, if someone’s going to show me actual footage of open heart surgery, I’d appreciate a trigger warning.