Sex, Drugs, and Showbiz in Massachusetts

Tonight at 7, as part of its tuneful series Cinema Jukebox, the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, throws the spotlight on one of the last great American films of the 1970s, as Bob Fosse’s showstopping All That Jazz screens in 35 mm.With this spectacular masterpiece, released to instant acclaim in December of 1979, the legendary choreographer and director Fosse took some cues from his own life and career, casting Roy Scheider as authorial proxy Joe Gideon, a Dexedrine-fueled, chain-smoking, oversexed perfectionist simultaneously staging a new Broadway production and under the gun to finish editing his latest movie. Boldly orchestrated and inventively edited, the no-holds-barred film burrows deep into Gideon’s inner world, erupting in a series of hallucinatory (and arrestingly staged) dance numbers as his body reaches its breaking point. “The films [Fosse] made before All That Jazz were like no others,” writes critic Hilton Als in his liner essay for our release, “but it’s in this film, a kind of moral-minded, autobiographical phantasmagoria, that Fosse learned to make the camera dance too.”