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!