As a teenage movie nut in LA, here was my formula for a perfect summer Sunday:
1) Take bus to Hollywood with best friend.
2) See latest art film.
3) Discuss over Chinese food.
Of all the movies we saw, two in particular stand out in my memory (well, three, but I’m still trying to forget Caligula).
One was All That Jazz (1979), directed by Bob Fosse. The other was The Stunt Man (1980), directed by Richard Rush.
It occurs to me that both these movies have a similarly surreal sensibility and raise the same fundamental question: Is art worth dying for?
I confess that when I saw All That Jazz, the movie was almost ruined for me because there was an early trailer for The Empire Strikes Back, and my first glimpse of those giant mechanical walkers on that ice planet and the Millenium Falcon swooping between asteroids was so exciting that the last thing I wanted to see was a boring goddamn movie about people dancing through their tears and stuff.
But the movie won me over.
Actually, I knew it was good from the very first scene, which was a stage full of hopeful dancers auditioning to the song “On Broadway” while the director of the show (a brilliantly manic Roy Scheider) mercilessly culls the weaklings. Just as Quint says in Jaws, “I’ll never put on a lifejacket again”—well, I’ll never listen to “On Broadway” the same way again.
In All That Jazz, Roy Scheider is essentially playing Bob Fosse (Lenny, Cabaret), a philandering, heavily self-medicated, cardiac-impaired choreographer and movie director, who is literally killing himself for his art. And who wouldn’t, if the Angel of Death was as sexy as Jessica Lange, whose coy appearances are the only restful moments in the film?
But Scheider’s tormented artiste has a lot of beautiful women in his life, including his long-suffering wife and daughter, who all want him to live. Torn between the forces of love/life and art/death, he is a man driven by his higher calling, and so must ultimately face the music, which in this case is a showstopping musical dream sequence to the tune of “Bye-Bye Love,” intercut with actual footage of Bob Fosse’s real open-heart surgery.
Wow.
Anyway, I love All That Jazz because it is so personal.
It’s also a bit of a giant prank, Fosse saying, “I give you my heart—literally.” I like to imagine Fosse’s toe-tapping vision of death leading straight to the hilariously inane “Jazz Heaven” of Woody Allen’s own self-referential opus, Stardust Memories. Also an awesome film, by the way. One of Allen’s greatest, as far as I’m concerned—there’s nothing better than when directors go to war with their personal demons.
Speaking of which, then there’s The Stunt Man.
I had no interest in The Stunt Man when I first heard about it, because I thought it was just another dumb stunt movie like the underwhelming Burt Reynolds flick, Hooper. There had been a spate of car-crash movies in the ‘70s, and as a kid I liked some of them, mainly Gone in 60 Seconds, The Gumball Rally, Vanishing Point, and Eat My Dust, but the fad was over, and I had no interest in revisiting it.
Yet there was something peculiar in how The Stunt Man was being marketed. Something that made me think it might not be the last gasp of a tired gimmick, but a different kind of film altogether. A big part of this was the movie’s poster, which was a striking illustration of a demon with a movie camera. No glamour shots, no explosions or flying cars—just this mysterious cartoon image. On the basis of that poster, and some promising advance buzz, my friend and I decided to go see it.
We weren’t disappointed.
The Stunt Man is the story of a sane man in an insane world (Steve Railsback, still crazy-eyed from Helter-Skelter and Lifeforce), who escapes from prison and stumbles across the seaside location shoot for a big-budget war movie.
He soon catches the eye of the film’s grandiose and slightly sadistic director, Eli Cross, played to perfection by Peter O’Toole.
Right away, the movie blurs the line between reality and illusion.
Bombs explode, and we are set up to believe that it’s a horrible accident, only to learn that it’s cinematic trickery: the blood and guts are fake. But not everything is make-believe. Accidents do happen, and when one of the movie’s stuntmen is killed, the director enlists the escaped con to take his place.
Just as we are thrown off balance by the ploys of director Richard Rush, Railsback’s character is never quite sure whether Eli Cross is trying to kill him for the sake of Art.
Though Railsback is too wired to be entirely sympathetic (he is a criminal after all, and it’s only late in the movie that we learn the goofy circumstances of his crime), we can identify with his plight because we are just as lost.
Yet The Stunt Man is not a dark, Kafkaesque nightmare. The sense of dread is held off by slapstick comedy and some truly epic action scenes, particularly a rooftop chase with German soldiers and strafing biplanes. This is great stuff, pre CGI.
My only quibble with The Stunt Man is that I don’t like the soft-focus way it was shot. This was a popular filming style in the ‘70s, and I know that Rush did it deliberately for the dreamlike effect, but I’ve always hated that Vaseline-smeared look. But that’s just me; others may dig it.
A big added attraction to the movie now is the fantastic making-of documentary (notice I don’t say “featurette”) hosted by Richard Rush. This thing is amazing, almost as good (and as long) as the movie itself, and is required viewing for anyone interested in the challenges of making a movie that does not gibe with studio expectations.
Rush clearly relishes the chance to tell his story in full, jazzing up the monologue with special effects, inserting lost scenes, and even jumping in his private plane to revisit the original locations. It’s like spending a pleasant day with the guy.
I only wish Bob Fosse had made a similar doc about All That Jazz. I bet he would have really put his heart into it.
