All That Jazz (Columbia, 20th Century-Fox, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 1) Turner Classic Movies showed a night of Academy Award-winning or -nominated films about music and dancing, of which the one I decided to watch was Bob Fosse’s highly regarded, semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz (1979). This was the fourth of the five films Fosse directed, along with Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of a show Fosse had also done on stage but the studio, Universal, forced him to use Shirley MacLaine as the star instead of Gwen Verdon, Mrs. Bob Fosse, who’d played the part on stage; Cabaret (1972), which won Fosse the Best Director Academy Award; Lenny (1975), the biopic of comedian Lenny Bruce (which once again suffered a cast change from play to film; on stage Cliff Gorman had played Bruce, but for the movie they got Dustin Hoffman because he had a bigger movie “name”); All That Jazz (1979); and Star 80 (1983), about the rise to stardom of model and Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten and her murder at the hands of her ferociously jealous manager and husband, Paul Snider. I’d seen All That Jazz before in the early 1980’s at a party thrown by some of the friends Cat Ortiz and I knew at UC San Diego; they hosted a party of movies on videotape when that was still a major novelty. I remember not liking the film, finding it really self-indulgent and almost offensive, and calling it overrated while I thought Star 80 was underrated. But when I saw it on TCM’s schedule last night I decided to give it another try.

All That Jazz was based on an incident in Fosse’s real life: a heart attack he suffered while simultaneously directing the stage version of Chicago and editing the film Lenny in 1975. Fosse came near death as a result, and was inspired to create this film about choreographer and director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing alcoholic and drug addict who begins every morning with an implacably consistent routine: he takes Alka-Seltzer and Dexedrine while listening to a Vivaldi concerto (on cassette, which really dates this movie) while facing his bathroom mirror, then says to himself, “It’s show time!” He also has an ex-wife named Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer) whom he continues to work with in his shows, and a current main squeeze named Katie Jagger (Ann Reinking), with whom he has an argument when she wants to leave town for a six months’ tour with someone else’s show and he wants her to stay in town. There’s one grimly funny scene in which Audrey lets herself into Joe Gideon’s apartment (she still has his key) while Katie is in bed with him, and we brace ourselves for the seemingly inevitable confrontation … only it never occurs because Katie is able to hide her body behind Joe’s so Audrey doesn’t see her. Gideon is simultaneously working on a lumbering stage musical called NY/LA and editing a movie he’s shot called The Stand-Up, and dealing with both sets of producers. The Broadway ones are concerned mainly about the sheer amount of sexual content he’s working into the big numbers, particularly one called “Class” which supposedly takes place on an airliner and features not only men dancing with women but women dancing with women and men dancing with men. (It’s an interesting index of the grudging level of social acceptance Gay men and Lesbians were just beginning to claw towards in the late 1970’s before the calamity of AIDS associated the Queer community in general with illness and death.) The Hollywood ones are upset with how far he’s gone over budget both in shooting The Stand-Up and in editing it, including obsessively recutting a sequence in which Cliff Gorman’s character performs a routine satirizing Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her famous five stages of grief. (The routine features a nice line about how Kübler-Ross presented herself as a definitive authority on dying when she hadn’t yet died herself.)

Gideon is in the middle of rehearsing NY/LA when he starts getting symptoms of heart disease, which leads to a full-blown heart attack and eventually open-heart surgery. Having had open-heart surgery myself, I couldn’t help but think as the blatant med-porn of Gideon’s body being sliced open flashed on the screen, “Did this really happen to me?” (It did, and I have the chest scars to prove it.) The credits for All That Jazz contain an acknowledgment to Dr. John E. Hutchinson III as a technical advisor. It’s also grimly appropriate that Gideon’s doctor, Ballinger (Michael Tolen), is warning him to cut back on his drinking and smoking while both of them are puffing away like mad on cigarettes and coughing big-time from it. (One of my ongoing fascinations with older movies is seeing the sheer amount of smoking doctors, nurses, and patients all did in environments that today maintain rigid anti-smoking policies.) All That Jazz remains a fascinating movie, but not always for the right reasons. It co-won the Cannes Film Festival’s best-movie award the year it was shown there (1980) and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematographer, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay (for Fosse and Robert Alan Aurthur, who also produced the film and whose last project it was), but it only won for four lesser categories: Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Score. Before Roy Scheider got the part of Joe Gideon, it was offered to Paul Newman and also to Scheider’s former Jaws cast-mate, Richard Dreyfuss, but it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Scheider in the role, he’s so spot-on.

At the same time All That Jazz is a film I respect a lot more than I really enjoy; there’s a certain sick level of self-satisfaction in watching the downward spiral of a man who is clearly destroying himself, but at least for me it only sporadically works. You have to be given some reason why you should care about this man, and you aren’t except for a few ultra-brief flashes. There’s a grim ending sequence in which the producers of the show-within-the-show NY/LA realize that they’re actually better off financially if Joe Gideon dies, since if he croaks they’ll be able to collect enough profit from the insurance company to pay off the incurred costs and have $600,000 left over, while if they wait the four months before his doctors clear him to return to work on it, they’ll have to use their own money to keep the cast together. (I wonder if this was a problem for all the shows on Broadway which had to close when the COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect, at least a few of which did open after all once the lockdowns were lifted.) On my first go-round with All That Jazz I had especially disliked the final number, with Ben Vereen as “O’Connor Flood” enthusiastically singing off Joe Gideon with the Everly Brothers’ song “Bye, Bye, Love,” with the lyrics appropriately tweaked to “Bye, Bye, Life.” This time around that seemed like one of the best parts of the movie, along with the “Class” number: artfully rewritten and tweaked in the lyrics to give Gideon the larger-than-life send-up the character deserves. Two women are wearing body stockings emblazoned with drawings of arteries and veins as they become part of his chorus line, alongside all the doctors, nurses (including one he’s repeatedly made passes at), and others who’ve tried to take care of him. Then this spectacular number comes through a thudding halt and we see Gideon’s real end: he dies and is zipped up into a plastic body bag. Those are the two big spectacular numbers; the others are pretty much a compendium of Fosse’s Greatest Hits, with lots of jerky, almost robotic movements; lots of people waving and strutting around in hats, a sequence that blatantly rips off the “Two Ladies” number in Fosse’s Cabaret, another driven by finger-snapping based on a similar song in Sweet Charity, and so on. There’s a marvelous sequence in which an older woman TV film critic blasts Gideon’s newly released The Stand-Up for being pretentious, self-referential, and dull: precisely the criticisms I would make about All That Jazz!

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (David Foster Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 28) my husband Charles and I watched a legendary movie neither of us had seen before (at least I hadn’t seen it; I’m not sure whether Charles did or not): McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a 1971 neo-Western directed by Robert Altman, co-written by him and Brian McKay (with uncredited contributions from Ben Maddow, Joseph Calvelli, and Robert Towne), based on a novel from 1959 by Edmund Naughton simply called McCabe. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest in 1902 and revolves around a mining-driven boom town (though we don’t see what’s being mined or any scenes of the characters actually working) with the improbable name of Presbyterian Church, after the town’s largest building. John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler and typical Old West wanderer, arrives in town with the objective of making a lot of money playing poker with the locals – he’s passing himself off as “Pudgy” McCabe, a legendary gunslinger famous for knocking off a particularly nasty outlaw. He hopes to use the money from his poker winnings to open a whorehouse in town, and to that end he buys three prostitutes from a local dealer. Then he runs into Constance Miller (Julie Christie, Beatty’s real-life off-screen partner at the time), who pushes her way into his enterprise by pointing out all the problems he’s blithely ignoring, including the obvious complications of pregnancy and STD’s. Despite McCabe’s disinterest in any business partners, the two work together with Mrs. Miller taking charge of the prostitution operation and McCabe running the associated saloon and gambling den. Then complications arise in the form of two representatives from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company in nearby Bearpaw, whose workers are the main client base of McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s enterprises. The two, Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland), offer to buy out McCabe for $5,000, which they later raise to $6,250. When McCabe turns them down, insisting on $12,000 to $14,000, Sears and Hollander bluntly tell him that their employers have no intention of paying that much. Instead they’re going to bring in a hit squad of Breed (Jace Vander Veen), Butler (Hugh Millais), and The Kid (Manfred Schulz) to knock off McCabe and take his property by force. McCabe realizes that they’re going to kill him when he returns to Bearpaw and finds that both Sears and Hollander have left town. McCabe sees a local attorney, Clement Samuels (William Devane), who encourages him to fight the mining company in the courts, but it’s no use; Butler stalks McCabe and shoots him in the back, though as he’s dying McCabe is able to take a small derringer and shoot Butler in the forehead, thus killing him as well.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller was an important film in terms of its visual look; Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer. He had fled Hungary after the failure of the 1956 revolution against the country’s Soviet-backed government, and because the business of cinematography in the U.S. was so hard to break into (the American Society of Cinematographers was a notoriously “closed” union, meaning you weren’t allowed to join unless a previous member invited you), he made his living the next decade working non-union jobs for really terrible cheap producers like Arch Hall, Sr. Hall gave Zsigmond his first full cinematography job on the 1963 film The Sadist, which like all Hall, Sr.’s productions starred his son Arch Hall, Jr. By 1970 Zsigmond had gradually began to work his way into more prestigious jobs, but McCabe and Mrs. Miller was the film that really “made his bones.” Zsigmond developed a technique called “flashing,” which meant briefly exposing the raw film stock to light, creating a slightly fogged look that added to the verisimilitude. Though the film was shot in color, the “flashing” made it look more like the black-and-white photos of the era in which the story took place. Altman also insisted on shooting the film as much as possible in sequence to illustrate the growth of the town as McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s business acumen brings more money into it and the town expands as a result. He had his set construction crew building the town as he was shooting, and some of them actually appeared in the film as the construction workers they really were. Oddly, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie weren’t Altman’s first choices for the leads: he wanted Elliott Gould (who would later star for Altman as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, the absolutely worst film ever made about Raymond Chandler’s detective character) and Patricia Quinn. That was interesting since the film was sold largely on the basis of Beatty’s and Christie’s star power and the publicity surrounding their real-life relationship.

I’d like to report that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a masterpiece, but no can do; the film was obviously trying too hard to be “different.” With the Motion Picture Production Code finally having broken down a few years before and been replaced by the movie ratings system we’re familiar with today, Altman and his writers are obviously taking a certain joy in being able to show things and talk about them on screen that wouldn’t have been possible in the 1930’s or 1940’s. They could present a whorehouse as just that instead of having to call it a “dance hall” (the usual Code-era euphemism) and even show the breasts of some of the actresses playing hookers. There’s a certain air of in-your-face cheekiness about this movie which, paradoxically, makes it a lot less fun than it could have been. But the film’s major problem is Altman’s ponderously slow pace. Charles found a lot of it boring and both of us sometimes had difficulty staying awake. McCabe and Mrs. Miller had a lot of Altman’s directorial trademarks, including overlapping and frequently repetitive dialogue (he wanted his actors to talk the way real people do, interrupting each other and saying the same things over again, and he did) and frequent cross-cuts that undermine any sense of pace. Just as we’re getting interested in and even engrossed by one story thread, Altman wrenches us away from it and whipsaws us into another. Altman’s best films, M*A*S*H and Nashville, make that device work and help him bring his stories and characters to vivid life. McCabe and Mrs. Miller just plods along from one not very interesting plot strand to another. It ends in what has got to be one of the all-time dullest and least exciting final shootouts in the history of the Western genre. There are some marvelously subtle bits in the film, including McCabe’s bitter opposition to drug use (especially among the Chinese mine workers in the area) versus Mrs. Miller’s carefully concealed opium addiction; and McCabe first paying Mrs. Miller to have sex with him (revealed quite cleverly by Altman keeping Zsigmond’s camera on the box where he’s put her fee rather than showing us them having sex) and then the two of them having sex without him paying her just before he gets tracked down and shot. Overall, though, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an overrated movie, despite some good qualities, and one of my particular aggravations was the exaggerated Cockney accent with which Julie Christie spoke. She sounds like she’s auditioning for Eliza Doolittle rather than running a relatively high-end brothel in 1902 Washington. It seems unbelievable to me that in the 2008 American Film Institute poll it was rated eighth among the “100 Best Westerns of All Time” – I can think of a lot of better Westerns than this!