A Chorus Line USA, PG-13, 113 m, 1985
Bob Fosse achieved in the first few minutes of All That Jazz what Richard Attenborough can’t seem to get done in the entire two hours of A Chorus Line: a sense of how wearing (and dehumanizing) a Broadway cattle call can be. But whereas Fosse was a veritable maestro of the stage and screen, Attenborough has only the most basic understanding of either. (He’s too much of a British classicist, too much of an exacting stuffed shirt to give a musical the punch it needs.) It’s hard to say why Sir Dickie was entrusted with such a singular sensation as A Chorus Line; his previous picture was the hellishly slow (and insufferably self-righteous) Gandhi. But the plethora of little golden men that Gandhi won at the ‘83 Oscars (much to the chagrin of those who were pulling for the far more lyrical E.T.) elevated Attenborough to Tinsel Town’s A-list, so allowing him to take on projects that otherwise might’ve gone to someone with a bit more vision, like Alan Smithee. Still, if the big wheels at Embassy had actually sat through Gandhi, they might’ve realized that putting Attenborough in charge of A Chorus Line makes about a much sense as putting James Ivory in charge of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. One of the longest-running shows on the Great White Way, A Chorus Line is opened up for this middling movie version with some offstage business—all of which feels tacked on, superfluous. (I also could’ve done without the glinting flashbacks and the piss-poor second unit footage of NYC’s hectic streets.) The embellishments don’t serve the story in any defensible way—they’re an unneeded and unwanted distraction. And the original book by James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nicholas Dante is Simple Simon stuff that doesn’t lend itself to cross-cutting: a number of out-of-work performers (or “gypsies”) answer the call to try out for a new song and dance extravaganza (the theatre next door is putting on something of arguably greater value, Glengarry Glen Ross), during which they talk (or sing) about their dreams, their anxieties, and their rotten childhoods. (They aren’t so much auditioning as they are confessing.) Fortunately, screenwriter Arnold Schulman has kept most of A Chorus Line on the stage where it belongs, but Attenborough doesn’t use that space (limited as it may be) imaginatively, and Ronnie Taylor’s cinematography has no lilt. (You normally have to look to television for mise-en-scène this uninspired.) When working with film, Fosse would choreograph his routines expressly for the camera (the “Take Off With Us” number in All That Jazz remains the most perfect union of dance and montage that I’ve ever seen), but Attenborough takes everything in as if he were shooting an early talkie. For God’s sake, Flashdance had more vitality. A Chorus Line is
an ensemble piece made up largely of unknowns, and while Michael Douglas brings
a touch of star power to the role of the cigar-chomping choreographer, Zach,
he’s ultimately wasted. Most of the time, he’s confined to the shadows, cut
off from the rest of the cast. (Like some kind of remote, Hughesian overseer,
Zach stays planted in the middle of the darkened house and barks orders
into a microphone.) It’s hard to say how much of Douglas’s performance was
actually recorded when his co-stars were present; they rarely occupy the same
frame. A few shots of the stage from over Zach’s shoulder might’ve solved
that problem, but editor John Bloom’s bag o’ tricks appears limited to
chopping between the twirlies’ boogie-oogie-oogieing and Zach’s (often poorly
matched) reactions. (It might’ve been smarter just to make him a disembodied
voice in the vein of Charlie Brown’s teacher.) Zach manipulates his subjects into
lowering their defenses and opening up, but nothing interesting comes of it.
Some scenes are plain gauche, such as when the dancers recall their earliest
sexual encounters in a song called “Surprise, Surprise,” which was written
by Marvin Hamlisch especially for this picture, and, quite frankly, sucks. I
wasn’t crazy about Schulman’s dialogue, either: it doesn’t hum and it’s
filled with gratuitous blasphemies. (I don’t know what my sweet Lord ever did
to this joker—except, of course, forgive him of his sins.) The best thing
about A Chorus Line is Audrey Landers, who has a high ol’ time singing
about her tits and ass in one of the show’s most winning ditties, “Dance:
Ten; Looks: Three.” Landers is so damned hot (I somehow never got this during
her years on “Dallas”) that she steals our attention away from the other
steppers, including Nicole Fosse. Yes, class, that’s Bob’s little girl. Is
her presence here a nod to Attenborough’s better? May 31, 2011 © Copyright 2011 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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