All That Jazz

What's left to say about Bob Fosse's "All That Jazz"? For about 35 years now, audiences have been delighting in its textural pleasures, despite the fact that this is a movie about a man's slow, painful death. Not many films can get you so high and so low simultaneously.

For those who haven't seen the film, wrap your head around this plot synopsis: "All That Jazz" dramatizes the period in Fosse's life when he was editing "Lenny" and staging "Chicago" simultaneously. His avatar in the film, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider,) is hopped up on speed, cycling through woman-after-woman, and is in-and-out of the hospital throughout the film. There's musical numbers, there's sex, there's drugs. "All That Jazz" is a Fellini-esque musical, complete with phantasmagorical choreography, that just happens to be about the slow expiration of an unsympathetic speed-freak ladies' man. It may borrow more than a cue from the comparably-autobiographical "8�", but this is a singular effort all the same.

Criterion's new release of Fosse's greatest film is packed with hours of extra features (though it's worth noting that most of them have already appeared on prior DVD releases of the film.) First up is a commentary track with editor Alan Heim, who's able to give some valuable insight into the film's intentionally fractured construction. There's also a 15 minute interview with Heim, separate from the commentary, where he discusses the editing of Fosse's films more generally (he also discusses Fosse's "Lenny," which made use of comparable editing patterns.) Another commentary feature sees star Roy Scheider offering commentary over selective scenes of the movie, adding up to about a half-hour's worth of footage.

Then there's a barrelful of other interview features strewn throughout the disc. Ann Reinking and Erzsebet Foldi, who played Gideon's girlfriend and daughter, respectively, also have a half-hour sit-down where they talk about the film. Sam Wasson, who wrote a Fosse biography, is also represented in 20 minutes of interview footage; he mainly discusses the differences between Fosse's actual life and that of Gideon depicted in the film. Then there's a featurette, "Perverting the Standards," that brings together everyone from Mark Mothersbaugh to Liza Minnelli to discuss the sneakily subversive nature of Fosse's direction and choreography.

Speaking of Fosse, Criterion has dug into the archives to find some footage of the man himself. Then there's a half-hour episode of the show "Tomorrow," sourced from 1980, where Fosse takes part in a roundtable discussion on dance choreography. We get more of that in another half-hour 80s TV show, "The South Bank Show," where Fosse discusses "All That Jazz." Finally, there's a half-hour of interview footage that Fosse shot with Gene Shalit (in the mid-80s, right before Fosse's death,) where they discuss his whole career retrospective-style.

Past that, we get a little bit more from the archives: a theatrical trailer, a very short interview with Scheider filmed during the production of "Jazz," and about 7 minutes of footage of Fosse directing the movie, on the set.

Watching him work on "Jazz" -- and watching the meticulously crafted, yet lively, and hallucinogenic masterpiece of a film that he made -- we realize that he's every bit as much an integral part of the mythology of the "New Hollywood" as was Altman, Scorsese or Coppola. Like Jacques Demy was to the French New Wave, Fosse was to its American counterpart: he has a worldview just as personal, as autobiographical, and as unsparing as his peers. Yet he was able to paint that worldview onto the screen in a more traditional, sensational -- and yes, musical -- manner.

"All That Jazz"
Blu-ray/DVD Dual Format Release
Criterion.com
$39.95