Word: aurthur
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...JOHNSON WROTE that "a judicious and faithful narrative" of any man's life could prove useful and instructive; certainly the life of a genius like Bob Fosse ought to be more interesting than most. Would that Dr. Johnson had written All That Jazz! It was written by Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse himself and it is very bad. There are five levels in the movie, at least three of them dull. The first is Physical. This is the Broadway and Personal milieu, littered with caricatures of producers, dancers and composers. ("But they're caricatures in real life!" Fosse would probably...
...mysterious and beautiful Lady in White in a ghostly nightclub, surrounded by vaudevillian props and masks out of his past. They provide running commentary on the Physical level and play illuminating word association games. This is lazy writing, made even more irritating by its artsiness. If Fosse and Aurthur knew how to integrate psychological observations into the lines themselves (which is what drama is all about), they wouldn't need to have characters look into the screen and say, "You're this, Joe; you're that, Joe." They would show it. Part of this failure is surely Fosse's lack...
...THAT JAZZ Directed by Bob Fosse Screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur and Bob Fosse
DIED. Robert Alan Aurthur, 56, television playwright, who wrote for such 1950s series as Philco Television Playhouse and Studio One; of lung cancer; in New York City. A Marine combat correspondent during World War II, Aurthur wrote short fiction for The New Yorker before becoming one of TV's Big Four dramatists (the other three: Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, Paddy Chayefsky). Aurthur's award-winning credits included Man on the Mountain top (1954) and A Man Is Ten Feet Tall...
Director-Scenarist Robert Alan Aurthur is manifestly sympathetic to the black cause. But the film's sincerity is varnished with artifice. The interracial love affair is as uncomfortable as some of the dialogue ("Do you enjoy being a tall, dark secret?"). The film's open-ended references to a mysterious Negro "organization" unfortunately recall the paranoic fantasies of Ian Fleming's Mr. Big in Live and Let Die. Ultimately, The Lost Alan is notable less for what it does than for what its star does not do. After Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, many black...