Thieves (1977)

          During one of the best scenes in Thieves, the film adaptation of Herb Gardner’s seriocomic play about a couple whose marriage is disintegrating, Sally Cramer (Marlo Thomas) attempts small talk with a would-be lover, quickly realizing how challenging it is to be cute and superficial after reaching adulthood. “I think men like young girls because their stories are shorter,” she quips. Moments later, Sally discovers that the man’s bedroom is located at the top of a ladder leading to a loft. “Jesus,” she exclaims, “it’s hard to make this look like an accident.” These snippets capture the sharp wit that makes Thieves worthwhile, despite the project’s muddy approach to storytelling, theme, and tone. Although Thieves effectively depicts the thousand slights that drive spouses apart, Gardner also burdens the piece with lyricism, metaphor, and whimsy, trying to parallel domestic issues with larger societal problems. For instance, the title has multiple meanings, referring not only to the actual robbers who prey upon the New York City apartment building where Sally lives her husband, but also to time, which steals people’s lives though the passage of hours, minutes, and seconds. The heady stuff feels artificial and pretentious, whereas the intimate material is crisp and humane.

          When the story begins, Sally and Martin (Charles Grodin) have reached a marital impasse. She’s an effervescent delight with a deep social conscience and a wild imagination, but he’s become a dull conformist preoccupied with money and propriety. More than a decade into their union, they’ve managed to argue themselves into the early stages of a divorce. During the brief separation that ensues, Sally trysts with a swinger (John McMartin) whom she met in Central Park, and Larry makes time with a sexy neighbor (Ann Wedgworth). Also woven into the story are vignettes featuring Sally’s loudmouthed father (Irwin Corey), the Cramers’ eavesdropping neighbor (Hector Elizondo), and a teenaged criminal (Larry Scott).

          The tone is erratic, with serious topics including abortion treated lightly while comparatively trite subjects including nostalgia are presented with operatic scope. Moreover, Gardner’s flights of fancy—both in terms of dialogue and plotting—add an element of stylized satire, which clashes with the realism of the scenes involving the Cramers’ spats. Music is another weak spot, because scenes are connected via chirpy flute compositions and nonsense ragtime songs. (VIPs Shel Silverstein and Jule Style penned the tunes.) All of these incompatible elements produces a lack of focus that detracts from the charm of the best dialogue, and from the skill of the performances. Grodin’s mixture of deadpan moments and emotional outbursts is modulated nicely, Thomas adds grown-up world-weariness to the sexy/spunky vibe she perfected on That Girl, and the supporting players lend diverse flavors. Incidentally, famed choreographer/director Bob Fosse plays a small part as a junkie who tries to rob Grodin’s character.

Thieves: FUNKY

Lenny (1974)

          Leaving the discussion of whether this Bob Fosse-directed biopic “accurately” captures Lenny Bruce’s soul to others with more knowledge of the matter, it’s fair to describe Lenny as one of the boldest attempts ever made to find a cinematic style perfectly suited to a real-life subject. In many ways echoing the vibe of the smoky jazz clubs where the real Bruce earned his reputation as an iconic counterculture comedian, Fosse employs a freewheeling storytelling approach that jumps back and forth in time, frequently lingering on extended re-creations of famous Bruce monologues. Furthermore, Fosse presents the whole picture in stark black-and-white cinematography that suggests rare footage of an underground performer caught in the act. One could easily argue, in fact, that Lenny has an overabundance of directorial imprint, bludgeoning its story with razzle-dazzle showmanship and a self-consciously grim tone. Yet that might actually be how Fosse employs his artistic license to the greatest effect. Perhaps this isn’t a film about who Lenny Bruce was, per se, but rather a film about what Lenny Bruce meant—in the sense of representing onscreen the milieu that Bruce painted with the incendiary words of his comedy routines.

          Accordingly, the world of Lenny is a dour space filled with drugs, rage, sex, and trouble. Moreover, just as Bruce eventually succumbed to his own darkness, wasting the last years of his life on fruitless censorship battles before dying of a drug overdose at age 40 in 1966, Lenny hurtles into bleaker and bleaker terrain with each passing scene. It’s unlikely anyone will ever make a more depressing film about a funnyman.

          Cast wisely for his skill at channeling Bruce’s self-destructive intensity, rather than any superficial ability to replicate Bruce’s comedic technique, Dustin Hoffman drives the film with a merciless performance. He incarnates Bruce as a self-involved, self-righteous son of a bitch who fascinates and repels people at the same time. Admirable for his chutzpah and for his messianic crusade to draw taboo subjects into the light, Bruce comes across as a man who must die for postwar America’s sins—in aggravating the establishment, Bruce changes the world even as he damns himself.

          Amid this provocative situating of Bruce as a free-speech hero, Fosse investigates Bruce’s private life primarily through Bruce’s courtship with and marriage to a stripper named Honey. Working from a literate script by Julian Barry, who adapted his own play of the same name, Fosse lingers on curvaceous actress Valerie Perrine (who plays Honey) in a way that echoes Bruce’s fascination with sleazy sexuality. (One typical flourish: Fosse intercuts a threesome in the Bruce bedroom with the nightclub routine it inspires, during which Bruce memorably opines in a sing-song voice, “I like dykes.”) Advancing the idea of Bruce-as-martyr, much of the film explores Bruce’s attempt to clean up his act for the mainstream, an endeavor that results in spectacular failure. Then, finally, the film dramatizes Bruce’s descent into oblivion with harrowing realism.

          Despite its exquisite artistic and technical qualities—notably Fosse’s quicksilver storytelling and Robert Surtees’ crisp cinematography—Lenny is a rough ride, presenting a barrage of anger and emotional abuse and wasted talent. A bit much? Perhaps. Nonetheless, the film garnered myriad accolades, including Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. The film also serves, although to a much lesser degree than All That Jazz (1979), as something of a veiled autobiography for Fosse, whose life had parallels to Bruce’s toxic combination of onstage pizzazz and offstage extremes.

Lenny: GROOVY

The Little Prince (1974)

          Although I managed to pass through childhood without any exposure to the story, I’ve learned that French author/aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fantastical novella The Little Prince is one of the most successful and widely read children’s stories of the 20th century. I mention this by way of stating that I approached this film adaptation without any feelings toward the source material, so others can hold forth on whether the picture does justice to de Saint-Exupéry’s writing. Watching the film of The Little Prince as its own entity, I found little to like despite the imaginative narrative and worthwhile themes. Director Stanley Donen, a giant of studio-era musical films whose career was winding down when he made The Little Prince, brings a fair amount of style in the form of clever fisheye-lens photography and general exuberance, but the combination of coldly professional acting by the leading players and distractingly artificial settings for many scenes makes the piece feel perfunctory rather than passionate.

          It’s also not a good sign that when famed choreographer-director Bob Fosse shows up in a rare acting role, he completely takes over the film for several minutes with his signature brand of cinematic and physical movement; although merely credited as choreographer for his own sequence, Fosse likely had a hand in the design of camera shots and editing, as well, and his bit is the liveliest stretch of the movie.

          Anyway, the story of The Little Prince must lose something in translation, because as presented onscreen, it’s insipid. When a character known only as the Pilot (Richard Kiley) lands his plane in the Sahara after experiencing engine trouble, he meets a strange young boy, the Little Prince (Steven Warner), who claims to have come from an asteroid in outer space. The Little Prince regales the Pilot with tales of his encounters with strange characters, including a friendly Fox (Gene Wilder), a demanding Rose (Donna McKechnie), and a pernicious Snake (Fosse). Each encounter taught the Little Prince a lesson, and so does his friendship with the Pilot.

          As communicated through twee songs by the famed duo of Alan Jay Lerner (who also wrote the screenplay) and Frederick Loewe (who also composed the score), the Little Prince’s adventure says something about the importance of retaining a child’s innocence even in adult life. Yet while the content is admirable, the execution is blah. Exterior daytime scenes in the desert are visually dull, nighttime exterior scenes shot on a soundstage are phony-looking, and the tricks Donen uses to simulate outer-space environments are gimmicky. Yet it’s ultimately the performances that keep The Little Prince from achieving liftoff. Kiley, a lovely actor with a resonant voice, is too theatrical, and young Steven Warner comes across as an automaton doing what he’s told. So, even with Fosse’s dynamic dance sequence and Wilder’s touchy-feely extended cameo, there’s little heart in what should be a deeply moving parable.

The Little Prince: FUNKY

Cabaret (1972)

          Cabaret is the quintessential musical for people who don’t like musicals, myself included. Not only does it tell a hard-hitting, provocative story instead of just delivering cheerful fluff, it’s a real movie that happens to have music instead of a contrived framework for musical numbers. Tunes arise naturally during moments in which characters believably break into song, such as performances in the titular nightclub, so the numbers become tools that wizardly director Bob Fosse employs, alongside brazen editing and meticulous camerawork, to guide viewers into the psyches of the characters.

          Adapted from a pair of musicals that were in turn based on autobiographical stories by the English writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Germany during the Third Reich’s rise to power, Jay Presson Allen’s Oscar-nominated script weaves the myriad threads of source material into a seamless whole, telling the story of how sexually confused Englishman Brian Roberts (Michael York) learns life lessons with, and from, crass but vulnerable American songstress Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) during their eventful idyll in pre-World War II Berlin. Sally sings at the debauched Kit Kat Klub, and Brian is a new neighbor at her boarding house. After her overpowering personality draws Brian into Sally’s life, the two become enmeshed with three Germans: poor striver Fritz (Fritz Wepper), rich Nazi apologist Maximilian (Helmut Griem), and sheltered Jewish heiress Natalia (Marisa Berenson). The audience’s sense of what the future holds for these people lends a sense of pervasive dread to the narrative.

          Tying the film together are surrealistic scenes featuring the Kit Kat Klub’s unnamed Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey), who functions as a perverse Greek Chorus complete with grotesque makeup and an immaculate tux.
          Fosse’s storytelling is astonishing from the first scene to the last because he jumps from incisive subtlety to shocking directness at regular intervals, often in the same scene, and his legendary choreography infuses the film with propulsive physicality. Whether he’s staging a comical number such as “Two Ladies” or a tender one (especially the moving “Maybe This Time”), Fosse adeptly weaves the themes of the musical interludes into the flow of the story, so Cabaret never feels like it’s stopping for big numbers. Yet while the dancing is sensuous and spectacular, Fosse’s handling of quiet dramatic scenes is just as confident. Minelli and York have never been better than they are here, with Minelli blending soft colors into her brash persona, and York expertly depicting his character’s complicated mix of moral outrage and sexual angst. Grey is equally great, turning “Emcee” into one of the most enigmatically creepy characterizations of the early ’70s.

Cabaret: OUTTA SIGHT

All That Jazz (1979)

          Inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2  (1963), All That Jazz is Bob Fosse’s arresting rumination on the limitations of his own character and talent, seen through the prism of an onscreen doppelganger. The movie depicts a tumultuous chapter in the life of film director/choreographer/theater director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), who juggles the challenges of transforming a hokey stage musical into something fresh with long hours spent obsessively refining his latest movie, a biopic about a comedian that echoes Fosse’s Lenny (1974). Gideon also juggles intense relationships with several women, including a wife (Leland Palmer) and a girlfriend (Ann Reinking) driven to distraction by Gideon’s infidelities. Yet the protagonist’s true love might actually be Death, portrayed as an angelic beauty by Jessica Lange, because since his earliest days as a youth performer in raunchy burlesque shows (as shown in stylized dream sequences/flashbacks), Gideon’s been fascinated by the high-wire act of risking disastrous failure in order to chase extraordinary success. He’s also deeply aware of his own shortcomings, afraid of being discovered as a fraud who squanders his talent, and, as one insightful friend notes, terrified that in the final analysis, he might be—horror of horrors!—“ordinary.”
          The plentiful parallels to Fosse’s real life accentuate just how unflattering a self-portrait Fosse paints: Gideon is a perfectionist, philandering, pill-popping pain in the ass whom friends and colleagues somehow love anyway, because he’s so damn interesting and talented. So like Gideon, Fosse does a high-wire act, seeking to balance ego-tripping narcissism and merciless self-analysis. As a result, All That Jazz a film of rare psychological complexity and depth. Scheider gives the most nuanced and surprising performance of his career, beautifully depicting every contradictory aspect of the main character; the decidedly nonmusical performer even dives headfirst into a full-on musical number, and looks graceful guiding dancers through their moves (with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Fosse-style). Fosse cast real-life dancers Palmer and Reinking in the principal female roles, because their characters communicate with Gideon through exquisite body language, and few films integrate dance as fully into storytelling as All That Jazz, which seethes with the eroticism of artists whose bodies are their lives.
          Fosse justifies his razzle-dazzle reputation by presenting tasty clips from Gideon’s film-in-progress as well as a handful of jaw-dropping musical numbers, the standout of which is “Take Off With Us,” a nudity-drenched showstopper about casual sex that only the wicked Fosse could conceive and execute. All That Jazz tends to polarize viewers, with some dismissing it as an overwrought exercise in navel-gazing, but I’m among the partisans who consider it one of the sharpest character studies ever filmed. Watch for Wallace Shawn in a funny bit as a bean-counting producer, John Lithgow as a pompous theater director forever overshadowed by Gideon’s accomplishments, and the great actor/dancer Ben Vereen as an entertainer who takes showbiz obsequiousness to an otherworldly extreme.

All That Jazz: OUTTA SIGHT