All That Jazz – Special Music Edition (DVD-Video)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: B-     Film: B

 

 

A story or film about a creative person is not necessarily a film about creativity.  In the case of Bob Fosse’s self (and self-destructive) portrait All That Jazz (1979), that has been a pop trivialization of a very interesting and often bold look at the man, his business, living and how those lines to easily blur.  Roy Scheider gives one of his most interesting performances as the Fosse-like Joe Gideon, who is not right and it turns out, not well.

 

Though it is chronological at first, the screenplay (by Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse) eventually gets into multi-layered territory later in the film as it all starts to add up.  Many were shocked at its honesty, something several artists were trying out at this time (think Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories) but this is much more than a film that is about creativity and any naïve optimism thereof.  Instead, it is constantly cynical in a healthy way that proves unhealthy for Joe as he has too much disconnect despite all the people he came into contact with.  Regret is not the issue as much as it is about a man taking a deep look into his life, myth, own iconography and in a way that most would not dare to.

 

By hiring gritty Scheider, Fosse is saying that his treatment as a polite artistic icon in any way is wrong.  That he is flawed, three dimensional and needs to ask about the one thing too much pretentious art does not want to deal with: mortality.  This film has no problems with that at all.  If anything, it takes on the subject with the aggression of his strongest dance numbers.  Then there are those who will try to write it off as “post-modern” because he gets to watch his own demise, but even if that is true, that very much misses the point of and is an ethnic cleansing of the self-portrait that few artists would have ever dared.  Ben Vereen, Jessica Lange, John Lithgow, Sandahl Bergman, C.C.H. Pounder and Ann Reinking also star.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image was shot by Fellini cinematography favorite Giuseppe Rotunno, looking like the same limited transfer as before on the previous DVD.  The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix tries its best to upgrade the Dolby analog A-type sound from the original theatrical release, but this was a time when even that improvement over mono was in limited use, so this only sounds best in the music sequences.  Too bad, because the original masters of the music have to sound better than this.  The Dolby 2.0 Stereo option has some Pro Logic activity, but it is too lite to really matter.

 

Extras for this new edition includes a really good audio commentary track by editor Alan Helm that has some great observations about the film and cutting film, Movie-Oke “Take Off With Us” sing-along part, two stills sections, the Music Machine section allows you to go directing to the songs with chapter especially marked for them but a menu is also offered to click onto them, a making of the hit song “On Broadway” and two featurettes: Portrait of A Choreographer and Perverting The Standards.  These are not the same extras as the previous DVD and why both are not on one DVD is odd, but it will take Blu-ray to do this one well.  In the meantime, either version will do.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo