How I wish his Broadway credits were filmed, but, alas, they were largely not. (Although, there is a recorded version of Pippin with his original choreography but a special event cast, and he did not direct it.) You can find brief glimpses and chunks here and there online but not enough to do a proper analysis. My kingdom for the original production of Chicago! Instead, I'll be focusing on his five films and one television special he directed.
I bring all of this up to say that a career as long and fruitful as Fosse's deserves scrolls of text to examine, contextualize, and rhapsodize about it. I'm just focusing in on his brief career as a movie and television director. So let us begin!
Sweet Charity
To hear Shirley MacLaine tell it, she was entirely
responsible for Bob Fosse’s first directorial job. Studio executive Lew
Wasserman asked her what project she wanted to do, and she said Sweet
Charity. He asked her who she wanted to direct it, and she said Bob Fosse.
Wasserman said he was just a Broadway choreographer, not a film director.
MacLaine insisted that he was a true artist and would be an extraordinary
talent to bring to Hollywood, conveniently forgetting his brief time as a
contract player at MGM.
But she was right. Fosse was an extraordinary talent and primed for a career in the movies after his earliest abortive attempts. Sweet Charity is a piece that functions as a solid primer of Fosse’s cinema. Based not only on his successful Broadway show, but on a Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Sweet Charity is about an ever-optimistic private dancer looking for love in all the wrong places but undimmed by life’s hard-knocks. Burlesque houses, angular dance contortions, female flesh, a cold objectivity, the contradictory impulses of life expressed through movement and dance, Fellini-esque narratives and pictorial language – it is all right here.
But, like Liza Minnelli expressed during an interview in 2012, the dance scenes are good, the dialogue scenes are good, but the whole thing never quite coheres into a satisfying whole. Sweet Charity feels stuck between the New Hollywood and the rapidly crumbling studio system mode. A few musical numbers are also frustratingly literal in their presentation, like portions of “If My Friends Could See Me Now” or “I Love to Cry at Weddings” which features random freeze frames. Occasional flourishes show an imagination unsure of where to funnel all its creative energies.
Fosse does not seem to entirely know what to do with the flower children that occupy the periphery of the narrative. Although, the cameo by Sammy Davis, Jr. belting out “Rhythm of Life” does seem to make his mischievous sense of humor twinkle by treating the whole thing as a goofy spin on cult-like behavior. His camera seems far more engaged with poking fun at the office squares and empathetically observing the private dancers (who are clearly prostitutes, no matter what their dialogue may say) interacting with each other and their pervy customers. Notice how “Big Spender,” “Rich Man’s Frug,” and “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This” pop with a vitality that is missing elsewhere as if every synapse in the production finally started firing.
“Big Spender” is the obvious highlight of the film, and it is all downhill afterwards. It comes about twenty minutes into the movie, but it is an absolute stunner. Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly, two wild stallions who understand Fosse’s demands as a choreographer and dancer, demonstrate the tension in the lyrics by alternating between erotic eruptions and mechanical seductions. What Sweet Charity really needed was a lead who understood Fosse’s movements like they do.
It is not that Shirley MacLaine is bad, but she generally feels somehow miscast or like she is underserving the material. Her dancing is fine, but she is plainly not the type of dancer who understands the body language and movement of Fosse like, say, Rivera, Kelly, or Liza Minnelli. The charming innocent who greets life’s various setbacks and hardships with a giggle, a tear, and a smile while picking herself backup was a standard role for MacLaine even by 1969, and she does some unimpeachable work in the few scenes that seem to have a point.
Perhaps that is the biggest drawback to the film as a whole: the script seems to noodle about allowing scenes to drag on and sap the energy away. I am sure on stage this played entirely differently, but film is a very distinct medium compared to live theater. A strong score can only paper over these problems for so long, as can Fosse’s peppy visual embodiment of some of them. Sweet Charity is not a bad movie, but it is one that feels stuck between two poles and a little dusty. Fosse would quickly learn his lessons and give us a run of truly great work in quick succession. His first true masterpiece was only three years away, 1972’s Cabaret.
Cabaret
I came across Cabaret for the first time at a
highly formative time in my life. I was around 11 or 12, and I found it on
cable. Clearly, I did not understand every single nuance, yet the content spoke
to me on a very deep level. As time has gone on, Cabaret has only
solidified in my mind as the obvious choice for greatest movie musical ever
made.
This is not your typical musical, as it takes place in a very recognizable real world, with all the musical numbers largely kept to the Kit Kat Club, and in the ways that they provide diegetic commentary. Then there is the ambiguity of the ending, which could almost be read as defiant and hopeful if it were not for the pan across the crowd in the finale revealing an audience comprised of the burgeoning Nazi youth.
Taking place at the exact time when the Weimar Republic was ending and the Nazis were gaining more power and traction in German society, Cabaret lives up to Sally Bowles’ “divine decadence” philosophy of life. Presenting a society of corrosion and perverted sexuality, with Fosse keeping a cool distance from the proceedings. Other musicals are easier to swallow because they are warm and inviting, they are wholesome and filled with emotional uplift, but Cabaret stands in opposition to them.
Much like Christopher Isherwood’s impassive, documentary-style writing in The Berlin Stories, Cabaret is made up of acutely realized details and character developments. Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories are filled with memorable characters, and many of them are translated from page-to-screen with great success, but none quite as brilliantly as Sally Bowles.
In the novel (and stage show), Sally Bowles is an obviously untalented drug addict, and she is not quite that here. Part of the change in character comes from Liza Minnelli, a thoroughbred performer with a rafter-shaking voice and phenomenal dance talent. This version of Sally is all artifice, a commitment to exuberance, life’s many thrills, and an addiction to the nihilistic pleasures of living solely in the moment, of chasing the next high.
She makes “Cabaret” into both a declaration of self, and a defiant anthem of desperation. This Sally is no less self-destructive, but if she could get her act together, she could become the top-billed shining star of her dreams. That is never going to happen, and when the smiling mask cracks, Minnelli reveals the swirling, tortured, ugly emotions forcing Sally into chasing joy at all costs. Sally’s still an addict, but there is a sense of artifice over it all, a playacting and rewriting of reality to bury the ugliness. Hers is one of the best Oscar wins, ever.
Sally’s psychic torment in pursuit of merriment is a microcosm of much of the film, with the Kit Kat Club being the diseased soul reflecting what she is showing us. Led by Joel Grey’s grinning imp of an emcee, he takes us through not only the cabaret, but through the story, as the film constantly cuts back to the Kit Kat Club and the emcee either performing or introducing a performance. He becomes something of a twisted narrator and guide. He is also the first major character we meet in the opening number, “Willkommen,” which is something of an omen of things to come.
That opening number exposes the cosmopolitan nature in its death throes of the era. These numbers do not necessarily propel the story forward, so much as they act as running commentary stripped from the storytelling. “Mein Herr” is Sally’s first number, and not only does it introduce important aspects of her character, but it hints at the demise of her relationship with Brian (Michael York) one scene after they have been introduced to each other. “Two Ladies” makes explicit the ménage a trois between Sally, Brian, and Max (Helmut Griem), and it is also an absolute laugh riot of lascivious and bawdy humor. And “If You Could See Her” ends with a punchline about a person being Jewish right when the Nazis are appearing more often after having only been on the periphery for so much of the film. It also makes the film audience a duplicitous member of the laughing cabaret audience.
The one musical number to not take place in the Kit Kat Club, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” is a haunting, waking nightmare. As a blond youth begins singing, the crowd in the beer garden is filled with a tense unease at first before succumbing and singing along. The sequence ends with Brian and Max driving away while the entire beer garden stands in solidarity with the Nazi youth, and it is terrifying. It is also a perfect symbolic gesture for the rising antisemitism of the era.
All of this is so memorable because of Fosse’s expert direction, which is electric in energy and unique in editing choices. Most musicals edit on the beats of the score, or to capture the energy of the dancers. Fosse and David Bretherton’s editing is dynamic and rhythmic, but also completely original. Chicago is obviously indebted to Cabaret’s cross-cutting techniques and surgical removal of the musical numbers, but it cannot compete with the greatness on display here.
Cabaret ends just as Nazism is taking its stranglehold on the country, and these sexually amorphous, gender-bending, and deviant characters will either be flushed out of the society or escape of their own volition. Glamorously broken, this is a film that presents a subterranean group in its final cries of despair, masked as they are by subversion of emotional and political truths. It is at times hard to explain the sheer depth of feeling and artistry so evident when you watch Cabaret, but it is one of the greatest films ever produced.
Liza with a Z
Every ingenue has her year. It may not be the year of
their first movie or first success in some facet of the entertainment world,
but the year where they elevate from “promising young talent” to the “it girl”
of the moment. 1972 was Liza Minnelli’s year.
If Minnelli’s pedigree were not already a leg-up with her mother a thoroughbred entertainer (Judy Garland) and her father a supreme cinematic stylist (Vincente Minnelli), she would have still been launched into the stratosphere by her sheer charisma. She was not just born for the spotlight, but she feels at home in it. Having cut her teeth on Broadway and winning a Tony Award by nineteen, an Oscar nomination by twenty-three, and numerous television credits, including well-known stints on her mother’s specials, Minnelli was primed for the highest echelons of showbusiness when Bob Fosse came calling.
She had already begun her partnership with John Kander and Fred Ebb in Flora and the Red Menace, the 1965 show that won her that Tony Award at nineteen. So, the three of them were already several years deep into a life-long artistic partnership that proved most fruitful and fascinating in the dynamic range of roles and songs they wrote for her. Fosse was the upstart to cinema, with just the mixed Sweet Charity to his directorial credit, but the titan of Broadway. This group would come together to make one of the greatest films of all-time in Cabaret.
That triumph was so nice the four of them decided to see if they could capture the magic twice. Minnelli dubbed it “the first filmed concert for television,” and I find it is more of a one-woman stage show where Minnelli performs a medley of Cabaret, contemporary pop tunes in full jazz hands swagger, and Fosse’s iconic choreography in some of his hyper-stylized numbers. It is largely a beyond winning affair with only one section that is entertaining for its camp, but also a bit of a drag. (No pun intended.)
What emerges is an enshrinement to Liza. A singular hour-long experience where we watch her sweat, sing, dance, and act her way through a variety of numbers and Halston costumes, and it is never less than transcendent to watch her. She seems somehow outside of time. An old-school showbiz entertainer in the vein of her mother and famous pals like Frank Sinatra in an era of deep cynicism and more naturalistic performance. Minnelli is a joyful force that could destroy the backrow with the brilliance of her shine. As she said during the press tour for the 2006 remaster, “this is the kind of work I always loved doing. This is where I belong.”
Perhaps the greatest performance Minnelli ever gave was as her persona, cemented here, and ushered by Fosse, Kander, Ebb, and Halston. She pours tremulous poignancy into “God Bless the Child,” makes “Bye Bye Blackbird” look easy, and demonstrates a pleasing self-effacing humor in “Say Liza (Liza with a ‘Z’).” Nothing compares to the Cabaret medley, of course, but “Son of a Preacher Man” is nearly its rival for its strangeness as she belts out the song and gives it a full Broadway dance number. Only the weird minds of Fosse and Minnelli could take that conceit and (nearly) make it work.
Minnelli’s so steamrolling in her exertion here that it is easy to chalk up the entire success to her, but Fosse’s directorial eye should not be undercut. Fosse flirts with the near sensory overload that appears at the end of All That Jazz or some of the rhythmic editing found in any of his works. Fosse keeps much of the choreography more attuned to Minnelli’s strengths – high kicks, lots of energy, or merely basking in her glow while she acts out the lyrics – but his telltale signs come roaring out in bits and pieces, most notably “Bye Bye Blackbird.” It is an artistic give-and-take that cemented their respective reputations.
Lenny
This is such a hard right turn after the triple punch of Sweet
Charity, Cabaret, and Liza with a Z that one can only assume
something akin to imposter syndrome took hold of Fosse as a film director. I
suppose anyone winning the triple crown of directing within such a short time
would freak out a bit. His Oscar came for Cabaret, deservedly (and
beating out no less than Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather), his
Emmys for Liza with a Z as producer, director, and choreographer, and a
double Tony win as director and choreographer for Pippin. Whew, I am
exhausted just writing all of that out.
There is a certain amount of emotional nakedness here with Fosse’s work always displaying a sense of imposter syndrome, look no further than the apologia All That Jazz. Lenny details how a second-rate vaudevillian comic became a champion of first amendment rights, free speech litigation, and comedic infamy. Lenny Bruce was another legendary artist who rose from the ranks of crowd-pleasing to serious artist before being destroyed by obsession, drug abuse, womanizing, and controversy.
If a wary sense of kinship between director and subject was not primarily evident in any cursory reading, then its treatment of show business as perilous and growth as liberation makes it patently clear. Again, these ideas would come into their fullest in his autobiographical All That Jazz. Here is a film that focuses less on Lenny Bruce’s halcyon days and far more on his obsessive, self-destructive quests to push the culture forward and battle against the conservative laws of the period.
Lenny echoes throughout another tale of American reinvention told through flashbacks and interviews with the left behind friends, family, and enemies: Citizen Kane. In fact, they open in a manner that is highly similar but registering in different emotional spaces. The closeup of Charles Foster Kane’s mouth is one of Orson Welles’ fantastical camera placements, while the one on Valerie Perrine’s Honey Bruce is borderline obscene. The closeup of her mouth is so extreme that we can see fine hairs around her lips. We pull back to watch her casually eat potato chips and discuss Lenny Bruce’s numerous arrests.
It is important that we open with Honey’s mouth as we quickly reveal her earliest days of stripping. Perrine’s act is a series of gyrations occasionally disturbed by shots of the crowd – horny old men, a few random lesbians, depraved male youths – and Fosse seems to be exhibiting a kind of non-judgment about the whole endeavor. He casts the audience as the unseen members of the crowd leaving us to wonder if we are passive bystanders. We are reminded of his youth spent in burlesque houses not unlike the one where Honey is performing. Again, the strange kinship between Fosse and Bruce reveals itself through various bits of backstage knowledge.
And again, that strange fraternal relationship to Citizen Kane as our hero (antihero?) is an active participant in his undoing and eventual solitude. Self-destruction of the great American made male through women, addiction, and grand expressions of assholery is like the flipside of the movement from nothing to top of the world. Kane and Bruce did it through grand displays of hubris, and how these destinies were ultimately as unavoidable as the truth behind the persona is largely unknowable to the masses. Bruce’s inability to accept, understand, or grapple with his demons, personal, legal, and otherwise, generated the power of his art and the unraveling of his life.
Fosse demonstrates all of this with a sharp, often beautifully filmed black-and-white biography. The artistic process is as magnificent as it is emotionally difficult to get through. Dustin Hoffman’s Method acting is full of sweaty monologues and remarkable depth. This was the prime of his career and the height of his talents, and all his nervous energy powers us through the various moods and modes. It is a lot to ask of an actor to not only recreate infamous comedy bits, but to then turn around and have them play someone falling down a rabbit hole of obsession.
Just as good, if not better, is Perrine as Honey. Fosse seems to view Honey/Perrine as the wounded heart and soul of the piece. A phone call where she is alternating between pleads and withdrawal is a stunning piece of work. Lenny is as much a story about Honey as it is about Lenny, and Fosse uses Perrine’s performance to give the most Fosse-like moments in the film. The “Hot Honey Harlow” sequence is a masterpiece not merely because of her performance, his choreography and camera setups, but because of the ways in which all of it is working in simpatico.
Much of Fosse’s work was an unintentional biography when it was not strictly autobiographical. Lenny openly flirts with bits and pieces that would appear in his final two films in more graphic detail. The self-loathing would only become more apparent as would the bind between artistic expression and maintaining your dignity. The last one is something that Fosse seems to argue cannot co-exist around each other.
All That Jazz
Heavily indebted to Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ in its
combination of reality and fantasy in exploring the artistic mind and
temperament, All That Jazz is a reflective, energetic movie about a
genius director/choreographer grappling with impending death. For such weighty
material, All That Jazz feels incredibly alive, joyous even in its
combination of self-examination and mordant humor.
Fosse turns his camera into a scan of his own brain, body, and soul. All That Jazz is littered with self-reflective choices, from storytelling beats, character relationships and interactions, to casting choices. Based on the time in Fosse’s life when he was editing Lenny and prepping Chicago for its Broadway premiere, the film follows the trials and tribulations of Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), as he juggles his directing duties with his relationships with his ex-wife (Leland Palmer), his girlfriend (Ann Reinking), his daughter (Erzsebet Foldi), and the angel of death, Angelique (Jessica Lange).
Love and death are eternally twisting and contorting around each other, and Gideon/Fosse are constantly reflecting, or deflecting, their own mortality and moral culpability. Palmer’s Gwen Verdon stand-in has an equally complex relationship with the fictional Fosse, as she is starring in his new stage show as a mea culpa from him for his years of philandering. While Reinking is doing a spin on her actual life at the time, and her presence is no less complicated as she is one of the three muses who chastise and celebrate him during his hospital hallucinations.
The most obvious example of this moral and mortality, love and death geometry are the frequent cutaways to a hallucinatory mind palace where Gideon flirts, argues, and makes a case for his life with Angelique. Lange’s natural coolness is used to tremendous effect here as she mostly sits impassively and calls him out on his bullshit, appearing almost charmed and entertained by his continual copping out. Lange is the angel of death as glamorous seductress, welcoming Gideon to her embrace in a clingy white dress and coy smile.
All That Jazz never asks for us to like Gideon, only to try and understand him even as he exhibits self-destructive and questionable behavior. He is a fascinating, complex character, brought to fully lived-in life by Roy Scheider, in a performance that should have gotten him an Oscar, but he was up against Dustin Hoffman’s more likable divorced dad in Kramer vs Kramer. Scheider’s cracked handsome face can project a tremendous amount of emotional range and complexity with relatively little movement. He does a tour de force of minimalistic acting in “Bye Bye Life,” an extended death rattle in Gideon’s imaginary life.
For all of Gideon’s obsession with his mortality, given a not-so-subtle hint in his morning ritual of eye drops, Alka-Seltzer, Dexedrine, ever-present cigarette, and daily dose of sex, he turns his imaginary life into an Ingmar Bergman-like confessional. We trace his history, his penchant for mordant humor, and cathartic peace making with the important individuals in his life. For all the obsessive flirtations and ruminations on mortality, All That Jazz is the liveliest tango with death you will ever watch.
The sweaty bodies in geometric patterns and angular movements of Fosse’s choreography are all there, and his dancer orgy is one of the great extended dance sequences in cinema. Yet what really lingers is Fosse’s dark humor, or the way he undercuts his brilliant choreography with a punchline. After the erotic dance is completed, his backers are in a frenzy of complaints about its vulgarity. Or how he crosscuts between his beautiful imagination, and his open-heart surgery. Or how he drops in a meeting with his backers learning that if he dies, and they let the show die, they will walk away with a fortune, in effect allowing Angelique to get a two-for-one special. But no joke is quite as dark as the final image, with Gideon getting wrapped up in a body bag as Ethel Merman belts out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” over the soundtrack. It is a sick joke, but it is also a brilliant bit of editing.
Viciously honest, All That Jazz is a masterpiece of the artist at work, at the end of his life, and a dazzling piece of eye candy. But there is more to it than its sweaty, grimy, beautiful, and haunted surface textures, as the narrative is a bounty of rich, dense dramatic material. Fosse only made five films, two of which are pinnacles of the movie musical that completely changed how we viewed their editing and emotional tactile senses.
Star 80
Each of Fosse’s film directorial works concerned
themselves with show business either as the primary engine of the plot or as
the background for the plot to play out. While All That Jazz and Lenny
found its central characters as major players in the business, most of his work
concerned those on the fringes or operating within the seediest parts. Think of
Sweet Charity’s dancehall-cum-whorehouse or Cabaret’s Kit Kat
Club which functions as a symbolic breeding ground for the rot of the Weimar
Republic.
But none of them quite compared to the absolute bottom feeders and oily, manipulative losers of Star 80. The story of Dorothy Stratten, the naïve, nubile Playboy Playmate who was murdered by her estranged husband at twenty and a victim of not only misogynistic culture, but of a sexually exploitative culture that found her innocence something that needed to be commodified and crushed. No shock then that Hugh Hefner was less than pleased with his fictional portrayal in this film as it examines the company line about Playboy being “a family” with Hefner as the ostensible loving patriarch.
Stratten is both a character and the fulcrum on which the plot’s major themes pivot. Her character is battered about between a small-time hustler, a movie director, and a magazine impresario who each try to market, profit, manufacture, and control her image, sexuality, and life choices. It starts from the earliest scenes in which Stratten is picked up at her after-school job by Paul Snider, essentially groomed into reciprocating his attentions and expressing a sexuality that was foreign to her and ends with her untimely murder.
Much of this power comes from the flashback structure which recalls Lenny in that many of them are interspersed with talking heads from various players involved. Not only that, but we also watch Snider post-killing raving maniacally, covered in blood to Stratten’s prone body, and the audience by proxy. He airs not just petty grievances but contorts his deplorable actions in ways that make him the long-suffering victim of her whims.
Praise must be paid to Eric Roberts for not only taking the role but refusing to play it at anything aside from complete and total commitment. Roberts makes Paul Snider the type of banal small-time huckster with big time dreams that plenty of us have walked the long way around to avoid. He displays an unctuous charm that grates on everyone he meets, except for Dorothy and some members of her family who are awed and easily swayed by his promises of big dreams and lavish lifestyles. His monster is one of pure male rage for all to see – a creature of manipulation, anger, abuse, and an undergirding impotence that makes his obsession with this beautiful creature so poisonous and tragic from the onset.
And praise to Fosse for a montage late in the film after the narrative meets up with Stratten’s final moments. We cut to Hefner glancing through shots of fresh new Playmates, then to Stratten’s tween sister who is blissfully unaware of the tragedy that has just befallen her family. It is as if Fosse was arguing that Dorothy Stratten was merely the latest grist, the newest young, desirable, innocent girl corrupted and destroyed to keep the entertainment culture moving. Star 80 demonstrated the exploitative streak within mass culture and the pervading sense that a woman can be possessed and controlled and destroyed if not compliant within her own subjugation.
This is not a surprise as so much of his work on film was preoccupied with the darkest impulses within our lives focused through the prism of show business. Even in its moments of triumph there is an undeniable poignancy. Mariel Hemmingway manages to convey everything great and horrific about the movie with her apple-cheeked, wholesome face that also manages to project a tremendous undercurrent of sadness. She is a small-town girl who is in disbelief about everything that has happened to her and fighting against the controlling forces in her life and unartfully seeking her own agency. She is a case study, a Hollywood tragedy, and a victim of the egos of the men around her all in one.
Star 80 would prove the final completed film of Fosse’s movie career. He was working on a project about Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist, to star Robert De Niro before he died in 1987. While his directing career behind the camera was meager, he left behind a series of films that remain vital, powerful, alive with ideas, sexuality, and sordidness.
If you have never seen any of his films, then I suggest going about correcting that oversight as soon as possible. Many of them are available across various streaming services (Netflix, HBO Max, Prime, etc.) and worth your time and discovery. While he left behind a limited body of film work, just five films, those films left behind the sterling legacy of a true visionary.
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