Cast:
Roy Scheider (Joe Gideon; Keith Gordon as young Joe Gideon), Jessica Lange (Angelique, the Angel of Death), Ann Reinking (Katie Jagger), Leland Palmer (Audrey Paris), Cliff Gorman (Davis Newman), Ben Vereen (O'Connor Flood), Erzsebet Foldi (Michelle Gideon), Michael Tolan (Dr. Ballinger), Max Wright (Joshua Penn), William LeMassena (Jonesy Hecht), Chris Chase (Leslie Perry), Deborah Geffner (Victoria Porter), Anthony Holland (Paul Dann), David Margulies (Larry Goldie), John Lithgow (Lucas Sergeant), with Sandahl Bergman, Eileen Casey, Bruce Davis, Gary Flannery, Jennifer Nairn-Smith, Danny Ruvolo, Leland Schwantes, John Sowinski, Candace Tovar, and Rima Vetter (principal dancers) Directed by Bob Fosse (#904 - Cabaret)
Review:
“It is off‐beat. Some people are locked into certain channels of thinking. They're rigid. They think you shouldn't show an operation in a musical. I know the film is strong, but the intention was to be strong. I accomplished what I set out to do, to move people out of the ordinary movie experience. So it's a compliment to all involved that the film is being talked about.”
If one remembers, Bob Fosse was quite the busy man in his age. The Chicago native was the son of a travelling salesman that was so big on being in dance that he was already performing professionally at the age of 13 before moving on to doing shows at burlesque clubs. In adulthood, he went from acting in musical productions in the late 1940s to directing and choreographing his own musical works such as the 1955 show Damn Yankees. He became a feature director with Sweet Charity (1969) that would see him rise in his peaks, which included the smash adaptation of Cabaret (1972) and his work on adapting the play Lenny to a film and also directing and choreographing the Chicago musical. The result of working on both led to him suffering a massive heart attack. He became interested in the subject of life and death as a result and when recovering from open-heart surgery, he came across the Hilma Wolitzer novel Ending. He tapped himself to work with Robert Alan Aurthur on a screenplay of the novel but found that he did not in fact want to "live with that kind of pain for a year and a half." The result of shifting course resulted in a script that would happen to share elements of Fosse's life, such as habits with certain substances (one perhaps may be struck by Fosse once being quoted as saying, "I don't have time for that kind of pain" when it came to the nature of needing to work and being afraid to stop). Various actors came in consideration for the lead role, ranging from Richard Dreyfuss (who dropped out, citing exhaustion) to Paul Newman (who declined an offer due to his issue with the character and regretted his decision), but Fosse would get his way in wanting Scheider. Fosse wrote the screenplay with Aurthur, who died of lung cancer in 1978. Fosse would direct one further film with Star 80 (a decidedly-different type of movie released in 1983) to go along with staging the production Big Deal. He died in 1987 at the age of 60 while in the process of staging a revival show of Sweet Charity. Incidentally, Reinking (who was Fosse's partner for a number of years, and, well, a star featured here) would later be involved in the direction of the 1999 musical revue of Fosse, which utilized a handful of songs from All that Jazz.
Admittedly, the comparison to Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) came pretty early in the film's lifetime, but there is some entertainment to be found here with a fairly game cast and some useful dancing that generally will prove worthy in the end. It is an expression of ego in all the facets imaginable for a man having himself in on a joke, if you think about it enough when it comes to its energy for the climax. It stylizes the pursuit of work at the expense of everything is a way that seems so raw and yet so real at the same time, since one might as well have a ball when going down in a blaze of glory. Scheider carries the movie with an intensity that is one for the ages in more ways than one, since, yes, he really can do a bit of song and dance to go with being among the noted names of lead presences for his era. The drive and passion of all-consuming work is all compulsive and obsessive in ways that Scheider apparently related to quite well when it came to being a regular worker. The mirage of his character is that he is hard to love but perhaps harder to hate (or perhaps in a different view, its the other way). Consider the scene where he is wrapped in the space looking back at a memory with Lange (playing the angel of death) that shows him with Reinking and all the quibbles that come with how one puts up with the other for so long ("staying in", as they say"). If the film really was just a self-indulgent muddle, it would not lend time for worthwhile moments with Lange and her knowing sense of timing (as one does when listening to recollections of a man on the cusp of reckless abandon) or with Reinking being game to playing out fact and fiction with a lover. It also can be damn funny, as wonderfully captured with "Take Off With Us", in which you get to see a rehearsal of dancers with flashlights and minimal clothing to a murmuring group of producers. In short, one can get taken everywhere by razzle dazzle but never really get anywhere. It all comes to a head for the final stage of the film in "Bye Bye Life" in such poignant nature in both the choreography and the music that has such a crisp tempo for one hell of a subject matter (you've got a crowd viewing some dancers dressed up in veiny get-ups) that even shows Scheider shaking hands down on the stage. On the whole, the movie is Fosse in its distilled form with a exhilarating showman who knew what to deliver in choreographed brilliance that knows death is inevitable and yet decides to move right ahead anyway because what else is there? As the film closes out, there really is no business like show business.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
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