Half-a-century ago this month - April 1969 - Bob Fosse began his career as a Hollywood director with Sweet Charity. It ended barely a decade later, and within the next both Fosse's Broadway bankability and then Fosse himself died too. Yet his name endures: Right now, the FX Network is halfway through a biodrama about him and (which he would have appreciated) with his name in the title - Fosse/Verdon, sharing billing with his missus and muse, Broadway's greatest dancer. Michelle Williams looks eerily like Gwen Verdon, at least from the side on the poster, although Sam Rockwell appears to me to be trying less for Fosse than for the last guy to play him on screen - Roy Scheider in All That Jazz. I had a very slight acquaintanceship with Fosse in his final years (when he seemed to me unhappy and frustrated) and a somewhat greater one with Gwen, who couldn't have been kinder and more generous to me. She had a taut, supple dancer's body, and told me that, after watching her in rehearsal on Redhead, the lyricist Dorothy Fields added a line for one of the songs - "Her posterior? Superior!" - of which Gwen was rather proud. I saw her in rehearsal late in life for a couple of TV things of mine she agreed to take part in, and can testify to how that couplet held up over the decades.
In the Sixties Broadway was the domain of the hyphenates: the choreographer-directors - Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion... Hollywood was less friendly terrain for the species, excepting (for a brief moment) Gene Kelly. Fosse had been dancing and choreographing on screen for a decade and a half, ever since Hermes Pan had let Fosse and the great Carol Haney work out their own moves for the best two minutes in the "From This Moment On" sequence in Kiss Me Kate (1953). The pelvic thrusts and whatnot seem sexier than they ought to be for the picture they're in, but there are worse problems one could have. He shared a similar number with Gwen Verdon in the film of Damn Yankees, and, as it's their only screen duet together, you wish it were up to the standard of Cole Porter's "From This Moment..." But instead it's "Who's Got The Pain when they do the mambo? Who's Got The Pain when they go 'ugh'?"
And that's how it might have stayed - choreographing and cameos. But in 1966 Sweet Charity opened huge on Broadway, and Universal bought the film rights almost immediately after opening night. They considered Gwen at forty too old and wanted Shirley MacLaine for the role. Shirley said she'd do it but only if Fosse choreographed and directed. "I don't know about directing," said Lew Wasserman, Universal's boss. "He's never directed a picture before." But Miss MacLaine insisted: As she likes to tell people, Fosse got her started on Broadway (in The Pajama Game), so she returned the compliment by getting him started in Hollywood. Sweet Charity was adapted from Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, but with the prostitute protagonist euphemized into a "taxi dancer" - that's to say, a dance-hall girl-for-hire rented by the number. It was a coy evasion on Broadway in 1966, and too cute by half in the Hollywood of 1969, and Fosse took his own cool seriously enough not to want to wind up making just another squaresville musical. So the numbers are ultra-groovy - the dance craze for the moneyed set in"The Rich Man's Frug", the bored dancers propositioning their clients with "Hey, Big Spender!", Sammy Davis Jr's Church of Saint Hipster shtick in "The Rhythm of Life"...
The film bombed. It cost twenty million, and only made eight, and, even though those numbers sound like rounding errors in an X-Men 12 budget, at the time they almost tanked Universal Pictures. "Everything I did on Sweet Charity I did three years later on Cabaret," Fosse told me, "but this time it worked." That's true in part - the paradoxically gauche sophistication of Liza Minnelli is a Weimar variation on Shirley Maclaine's lovable kook - but there were a couple of big differences. Cabaret on stage had been a formally conventional musical - which means that characters are chit-chatting around in naturalistic dialogue scenes and suddenly, in the middle of their living rooms or grocery stores, start singing and dancing accompanied by full orchestra. Fosse threw out all such songs in Cabaret and, with the exception of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" sung by the beautiful Aryan boy and the patrons of a German beer garden, confined all the numbers to the stage of the sleazy Kit-Kat Klub, where they functioned as on-stage commentaries on what was going on in the wider world.
So Fosse's Cabaret became the musical for people who don't like musicals. Indeed, it's a very 1972 movie: Beyond the club, far from the song'n'dance, characters talk carelessly and disarmingly about homosexuality and abortion and society's descent into tyranny. Fosse was cautious after Sweet Charity: one of the best Cabaret numbers, "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes", in which Joel Grey as the emcee dances with a gorilla wearing a tutu, ends with the line "If you could see her through my eyes ...she wouldn't look Jewish at all." But the lyricist, Fred Ebb, pointed out to me that, if you watch carefully, Fosse silences the orchestra and Grey just hisses the line unaccompanied. "That's so, if Bobby had any trouble from people," said Fred, "he could substitute the line without getting the musicians back in. He was still afraid."
He needn't have been. Getting into the spirit of the new realistic musical, I once brought up with Fosse the rather obvious point that it's totally unreal for a singer as talented as Liza Minnelli to be playing a crappy joint like the Kit-Kat Klub. "Yeah," he said. "In the end it's still a musical." But he'd found the sweet spot between the conventional musical and the new Hollywood, and he never wanted to move back.
He was so hot in 1972. I've mentioned before the small group of people (such as Tim Rice) who've won the EGOT - Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony. But Fosse won three of them in one year - the Oscar for Cabaret, the Tony for Pippin, the Emmy for the Liza with a Z special. He could have done almost anything he wanted to do, but what he wanted to do was relatively narrow. He was convinced that moviegoers no longer accepted the central convention of musicals - the guy walking down the street and bursting into song. "Bob felt the audience didn't like it," his friend and fellow director Stanley Donen told me. "I think it depends who's in the film." In a sense, the nearest he came to the aesthetic of a conventional musical was his one non-musical drama, Lenny, in which Dustin Hoffman plays the comedian Lenny Bruce and the comedy routines function the way the songs would in a musical. He followed that with Chicago, a Broadway swansong for Gwen Verdon about a Jazz Age murderess who parlays her criminal celebrity into a vaudeville career. Fosse was part of that generation of choreographer-directors who had replaced the "book musical" - Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe - with the "concept musical". But the concept was always the same: Life is literally a cabaret. No matter the subject matter, Fosse's treatment of it was reliably formulaic.
Along the way, he had a heart attack, and so he turned that into a cabaret, in the 1979 film All That Jazz. It has a brilliant opening number, "On Broadway", in which Fosse definitively solves the problem that had bedeviled film musicals for the previous half-century: the surest-fire crowdpleaser on stage - the big chorus number which overwhelms by the sheer weight of human presence - rarely retains its impact on the screen. "The bigger the group, the less power," Stanley Donen explained to me, "because in order to see them you have to pull further away - unless you do what Fosse did in the opening of All That Jazz, where you just see arms going up in the air." In his understanding of how to photograph dance, the director was better than he'd ever been. But he was making an autobiographical film about what it was like to be stressed out simultaneously working on Lenny and Chicago - the film and show he'd been working on just half-a-decade back.
The next picture finished his Hollywood career. Star 80 (1983) was the sad dispiriting biography of Dorothy Stratten, a Playboy playmate from Canada murdered by her boyfriend. Fosse cast Mariel Hemingway, Miss Hemingway ordered up a couple of breast implants, and the thing plays like All That Jazz pumped full of silicone. For the director, it was the ultimate fable of show business, with Mariel Hemingway as a blank slate of masturbatory fantasies. For The Washington Post, alas, it was "Bob Fosse's latest stylish stinker". In Hollywood it proved, to be his final stylish stinker. Three years later Big Deal was his final stylish stinker on Broadway.
He was supremely stylish, but insufficiently interested in story. That was the other difference between Sweet Charity and Cabaret. The latter made him a star because for once his style was yoked to a real big deal: If it sounds counter-intuitive and potentially reductive to use a decadent Berlin cabaret as a commentary about the rise of Nazism, well, it's less reductive than merely using great razzle-dazzle showbiz style to tell the same bleak story about the non-razzle-dazzling fringes of showbiz, whether in Times Square dance-halls, tatty comedy clubs or Hugh Hefner's grotto.
At the high-water market of All That Jazz, Fosse had pre-staged his own death. After open-heart surgery in 1974, he'd briefly considered changing his ways, but soon resumed the endless roundelay of hard work and hard play. For the film version, he characteristically gave his heart operation an unhappy ending - dying in hospital, his body-bag zipped up as Ethel Merman sings "There's No Business Like Show Business" and the credits roll. When real life got around to the finale, it couldn't quite match the movie: In 1987, on the day of the opening of the national tour of a Sweet Charity revival with Debbie Allen, Fosse collapsed and died on the sidewalk outside the Willard Hotel in Washington.
As always, Gwen Verdon was with him. The power balance had shifted over the years - in the Fifties, she was the star and he was her choreographer; in the Seventies, he was the star and she was the wife he screwed around on. But she was there in Washington that day, as she put it to me, as "Pavlov's dog" - because she'd been trained to know all the moves. And, ever since that Carol Haney sequence in Kiss Me Kate, Fosse had done those better than anyone. The stinkers fade leaving only the style - the white-gloved jazz hands and splayed knees perfectly poised on a darkened stage and waiting only for a story to match.
~There'll be plenty of movie talk on the Second Annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise, sailing up the Alaska coast in early September. Among Mark's guests will be Dennis Miller, star of Disclosure, The Net, What Happens in Vegas and, of course, Bordello of Blood, as well as Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, producers of last year's Gosnell. And Kathy Shaidle, who covered for Steyn in Mark at the Movies last summer, will also be aboard. Cabins are going spectacularly fast - and we're very nearly sold out. If your preferred accommodations are showing up online as unavailable, do call or email Cindy, our excellent cruise manager, and she might be able to pull a few strings: If you're dialing from beyond North America, it's +1 (770) 952-1959; if you're calling from Canada or the US, it's 1-800-707-1634. Or you can email your query here.
If you disagree with Steyn's movie columns and you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, then feel free to tell him in the comments section. What is The Mark Steyn Club about? Well, it's about to turn two years old, and with a great third year in the works. It's also a discussion group of lively people on the great questions of our time - and an audio Book of the Month Club, and a live music club, and a video poetry circle. We don't (yet) have a clubhouse, but we do have many other benefits. And, if you've got some kith or kin who might like the sound of all that and more, we do have a special Gift Membership that makes a great birthday present. More details here.
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I admit to being a big Fosse fan. I think All That Jazz is brilliant from beginning to end. Beginning - the group audition. End - the death scene with Scheider appearing as a guest on the Ben Vereen show (if memory serves, "my next guest is a so-so entertainer, not much of a human being, and this man is nobody's friend, you can clap if you want to ....". Talk about exposing your failings to the world! Fosse did - I guess he really wanted to change and I'm sorry if he didn't. I even thought Star 80, as gruesome a tale as it is, was a brilliant film, though the world disagrees with me (IMDB rating, 6.7).
One real pleasure I occasionally revisit is my DVD of Ann Reinking's Broadway show of Fosse dance, with Ben Vereen and backstage help from Gwen Verdon. Fosse was a genius, albeit a flawed one. What genius isn't? OK, Fred Astaire. But we can still appreciate Fosse's contribution to choreography and film. Thanks, Mark, for your discussion of him.
Mark replies:
Thanks, Rich. That DVD you refer to has a lot more than "backstage help" from Gwen, but, if she wasn't on stage, she never cared about credit. We had a long talk about that once, which I'll save for another day. Miss Verdon can be heard (with me) at the end of this Song of the Week special.
As always, Mark brings a marvelous combination of perception and affection to his subject. Bob Fosse did indeed hit the "sweet spot" between Broadway musicals and Hollywood for a short period but that period closed almost as soon as Fosse found it. He deserved the highest praise for his originality and passion but it seems like, after finally finding his style, he lost interest in the whole thing or maybe just lost his passion for it. Well, anyone who was beloved by Gwen Verdon had to have a lot going for him. .
What I don't understand is that almost everyone knows who Bob Fosse was but hardly anyone remembers Michael Kidd. The latter was about twelve years older than Bob and his choreography had the same creativity and exuberance as the best of Fosse. Kidd choreographed "The Bandwagon" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (including the famously muscular barn raising number) and won four or five Tony's during his long and distinguished career. He was a consummate professional but never created the fan-base who adore Bob Fosse and (for that matter) Jerome Robbins. Maybe Kidd was just TOO professional. He didn't have personal quirks or issues and when he had a job, he just got on with it. He was a pretty good actor too as he showed in the underrated little 1975 comedy " Smile" where he played a cynical-yet-decent beauty pageant show director driven nuts by the demands of parents, sponsors, past winners and contestants. I suppose "living well is the best revenge" and Kidd lived to be 92.
I very grateful for your Bob Fosse appreciation column. I had no idea of the number of stage shows and movies he did. I was reminded I first became aware of him when I saw the stage revival of "Chicago" in Chicago at the Chicago (?) Theater. My memory may be off on the theater name. Could my memory be correct Ann Reinking was named as performer or director? Do you have comments on Fosse and her relationship and her career? I will keep your article as a great guide to movies to watch. Your insights and comments on style and substance suggest some depth of knowledge and I wonder if you had some formal background in the entertainment and musical world. Finally, Is there a purposefully contradictory and odd mix of moods of substance and form captured in Chicago and All That Jazz with a musical about death and crime? By the way, Chicago seems to me as cynical and accurate picture of the corrupt politics of this city and state as any straight reporting.
Ann Reinking played the Gwen Verdon role in Fosse's life now and then, beginning with the Broadway production of "Pippin," where she was credited as a "featured dancer." That show was Fosse at his best, a seamless show with great music and dazzling choreography. I don't recall whether she had any role in the original production of "Chicago," which starred Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera and Jerry Orbach (which I also had the pleasure of seeing). However, as a guardian of Fosse's legacy, she was involved in the staging of the revival of "Chicago" "in the style of Bob Fosse" and also starred as Roxy Hart. She puposefully recreated the Fosse choreography and staging for "Nowadays" and the "Hot Honey Rag." Oddly, while the original production "only" ran for about 900 performances, its cynicism take about how a hysterical media can be cynically manipulated to create "fake celebrities" along with sympathy for the most odious characters has kept the revival alive for 22 years.
An odd coincidence: I was hit with an urge to listen to the song "Hey There" -- you know how something causes you to suddenly want to hear a particular song or piece of music -- and in this digital age I sought it on the internet, which led to searching on "Pajama Game" and original cast and production, and listening to John Raitt and Janis Paige singing it in the movie version, and other songs I remembered from the show, "Hernando's Hideaway" and "Steam Heat" (which I sang with my mother when I was a kid -- we loved the clang-clang-hiss bit, having lived with radiators and basement boilers in Brooklyn). The movie showed Fosse's choreography (as well as some amazing dancing -- check out "Steam Heat" especially), so it was funny that Mark focused on Fosse this week, although his directing career.
Could it be that great minds think alike?
Mark replies:
Could be, Lawrence. You can hear the composer himself, Richard Adler, singing "Hey There" plus other Pajama Game hits and an all-star version of "Heart" with me and Gwen Verdon in this Song of the Week special. Lot of good stuff lurking in the SteynOnline archives.
It still surprises me to learn that Lilith from Cheers danced alongside Ann Reinking in "Chicago."
What a treat to read this piece about Bob Fosse! Thank you for the historical context and your insight into his talented, complicated artistic personality. I could watch his number with Carol Haney in "Kiss Me Kate" over and over again, not to mention his extraordinary standing-still back-flip in "My Sister Eileen." I think he preferred Astaire's lightness to Kelly's athleticism in dance (or maybe his personality and Kelly's were just too big for the same stage). Astaire's entrance to the Dem Bones Bar in "The Bandwagon" (just before he runs into Cyd Charisse) looks like he was channeling Fosse, and his subsequent pas-de-deux with Charisse has quirky Fosse-esque moves. Love your movie features (as well as the song-of-the-week, Tales for our Time, Q&A, etc.)! Merci!
Mark replies:
That Astaire-Charisse bit is great. I'm not sure "Fosse-esque" was a thing at that time. Maybe we'll do a choreographic family tree one day - Jack Cole via Gwen Verdon (who was Cole's assistant) down to Fosse and beyond...
Fosse is also quite delightful in the rather small-budget - and I think, under-rated - musical "Give A Girl A Break." He's teamed with Debbie Reynolds, and they're just so cute together. Also, I can watch Marge and Gower Champion dance for hours on end. I would also like to mention what a delight it was to see Gwen Verdon - and for that matter, a favorite of mine from Hollywood's Golden Age, Don Ameche - in "Cocoon" when it came out back in the mid-80's. That's one of my chief pleasures of Mark's columns about the greats of the entertainment industry - my mind goes into this sort of daisy chain of associations.
Indeed, 1966 was such a dismal year for Hollywood that even the commies (or at least directors living under communist rule) made better cinema. Both Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" and Bondarchuk's "War and Peace" come out in that year.
Was 1966 the worst year for movies in living memory (esp. when you think of what came a year later -- for better or worse -- see the books "Pictures at a Revolution" and "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls")?
The other day some awful 1966 thing called "A Fine Madness" (I think) came on TCM, something about a poet in Greenwich Village and his "zany" adventures. There was a LOT of "zany" going around in those days, but a kind of Battan Death March sense of "wackiness":
"The Russians are Coming..." The "Batman" movie. "... Forum." "The Fortune Cookie." "Arabesque." The horrible "Stagecoach" remake. While the "important" movies were unforgivably ponderous -- how do you screw up a story like "Cast a Giant Shadow"?
Some good, even great stuff came out in 1966 but these films were either foreign ("Blow Up") or seemed that way ("Seconds", "...Virginia Wolf.")
The movies of 1966 were the hair metal bands that were huge just before grunge broke.
So right, Kathy. I don't know if Pauline Kael's appraisal of "Bonnie and Clyde" ("[T]he most excitingly American American movie since 'The Manchurian Candidate.'") holds up over time, but it was still a watershed film. Actually, much as I love to read the late reviewer, that comment alone crumbles under examination. "Candidate" pre-dates "Bonnie" by just five years, which, for me is like saying "the best bacon cheeseburger since my last one". And how "American American" can it be when it stars, in Wikipedia's terse summation, "a Lithuanian-born British Jewish actor"?
Kael's effusions aside, B&C is still a bracing slap in the face. (Oy, such faces! I'm a flaming heterosexual, but I'm not sure on who's punim I want to plant one first.) It seemed to implant the who-gives-a-f*ck attitude growing in society at large into film itself. And any film that saw the value of Michael J. Pollard does indeed deserve Kael's highest praise, "American American".
I think Kael meant the themes and "feel" of "The Manchurian Candidate," and probably didn't even give Laurence Harvey's background quite as much thought as that.
His out of place accent aside, he was perfect for the role, the only one in which his robotic, slightly "off" performance style was appropriate. (I sit through "Butterfield 8" again and again, each time wondering if and when he is being sarcastic or sincere.)
Beatty's alibi for casting himself and Dunaway to play the downright homely Bonnie and Clyde was, "That's how they saw themselves." I find that wholly defensible, which I realize is not the standard "conservative" view on the film, which supposedly "glamourizes crime."
The glamourization of crime is a serious concern — but it is also inevitable, because that is how humans are wired. Every Easter, Catholics renew their vow to reject "the glamour of evil" for a reason.
Glamourization is a human impulse, and I can't decide whether or not it is bad in and of itself. I recently watched (and watched and watched) the trailer for a Christian movie called "Breakthrough," based on the true story of a boy's miraculous survival after an accident. The trailer gave me goosebumps and I teared up (each time.) Why? One could say that, aesthetically, it "glamourized" -- prayer and miracles. Does that make the movie, or its message, bad? (This is a serious question.)
Glamour is kind of a universal language of tone, gesture, colour... The Esperanto of the eyes.
Kathy, you and others interested in the Bonnie & Clyde story might be interested in "The Highwaymen" on Netflix. It tells the story from the viewpoint of the lawmen tracking them down. At one point, Frank Hamer says something like "Glamorous? Last night they killed a gas station attendant for four dollars and a tank of gas." You might want to check it out.
Meanwhile, tonight the deep breaths have been taken and now comes the plunge on a show abbreviated GoT. Just sayin'....
I loved the 1966 Batman movie as well as the TV show on which it was based... Yes I was only 6 but I watched it again not long ago with my 20 something daughter who has similar tastes (or lack thereof) to me and the campy humor seemed to hold up pretty well.
Surely the era of the great but supremely depressing movies of the 70s (Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, etc. ) was grimmer to endure than the inconsequential movies of 1966...
Having already gone far out on a limb and made all "true" Batman fans spit out their drinks with my prior comment, I'll go ahead and jump off by saying I prefer the cartoony 1966 Batman (Burgess Meredith! Cesar Romero!) to all the versions that came later... Though admittedly Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in whichever movie that was is awesome, if that word can be used seriously anymore.
Yes I heard about that. Wasn't it based on a book by the policeman's son or grandson?