The Screengrab

Appearing at a time when it seemed the big-screen musical was an outdated relic of the past, Broadway veteran Bob Fosse's clever and accomplished Cabaret caught all of Hollywood by surprise.  Sophisticated, playful, adult and remarkably well-made, Cabaret was in, but not of, the classical musical tradition; and while it had many pillars of strength -- outstanding lead performances, rock-solid source material, sure-handed direction, and a unique approach to storytelling -- it wouldn't have been the huge critical and commercial success it became without its dazzling array of songs.

John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical had come along relatively late in the day, and though it proved extremely popular, there were plenty of reasons to suspect that it might not be an immediate success as a motion picture.  Its homosexual subtext -- drawn directly from the autobiographical writings of Christopher Isherwood that inspired the play -- and its attempts to fold an energetic romantic comedy into a grim story about psychologically desperate people trying to find happiness during the rise of the Nazi party were controversial and were likely to draw criticism from all quarters if not handled with great care.  Facing these issues as well as time constraints, at least seven songs were cut from the Broadway play, leaving only a dozen to make the transition to the big screen.  New characters would be introduced, old ones would be cut, and the lead role of Sally Bowles was to be Americanized in order to accomodate the actress who would be playing her:  Kander and Ebb's favorite collaborator, Liza Minelli.  Fosse made the decision to play up, rather than down, the sense of doomed decadence that pervaded the Berlin social demimonde in those days, and to film in start, contrasting, and muted colors, giving what was a widescreen musical extravaganza a justifiable noir feel.  Any of these factors might have sunk the production, but in all, they seemed to perfectly capture the tone, experience and mood of its audience of the day, who helped make it a runaway success upon release.

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Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks.

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Music critic Terry Teachout salutes Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd as "easily the most innovative movie of its kind to be made since Bob Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret" and "the best and most artistically serious film ever to be made from a Broadway musical." As Teachout points out, in the early days of al-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musicals, Hollywood routinely raided Broadway for songs and stars and even the titles of hit shows, but generally came up with their own stories for the movie versions; what worked on stage was understood to be different from what worked on screen. "In a Broadway musical, fictional characters sing and dance in everyday situations. On stage, this improbable convention is readily accepted by audiences, since the performers are physically present in the theater and can thus be seen to be 'real,' just as an actor who steps out of the onstage action of a play to address the audience directly does not thereby compromise our sense of his reality. For this reason, stage musicals need not be firmly based on a realistic plot and can make use of non-naturalistic 'presentational' techniques But the live-action sound film, consisting as it does of photographed movement, is essentially a realistic storytelling medium. . . These constraints necessarily caused golden-age film musicals to make use of conventionally naturalistic plots and, typically, to include fewer songs than did stage musicals of the same period. . . Moreover, the songs were far more likely to be performed in settings that 'explained' why the characters were performing them."

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NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center spends the end of the 2007 charting the evolution of a couple of decades in the life of the American dance musical, as seen through the career of one of its legendary practitioners, with "All That Fosse" (December 28 - January 1). Included are all five of the movies that Bob Fosse actually directed (starting with the clumsy debut of Sweet Charity and including the sizzling instant classic Cabaret and the self-lacerating, autobiographical All That Jazz.

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