Star 80 (1983) Nobody, but nobody knew the dark underbelly of show business as much as celebrated director-choreographer Bob Fosse.......
Through tap-dancing in seedy dives as a kid, then toiling as an MGM musical chorus boy and then on to his ultimate ascendency as premier crafter of iconic Broadway musicals and films, he never wavered from his deeply acidic view of his art......
Fosse wanted us to look behind the showstopping performers, the razzle-dazzle dancing, the glitz, the tinsel, all the stuff that provokes audiences into standing ovations...... he most excelled at .peeling off the glossy veneer of the world of entertainment, only to uncover.....
......a corrupt, soulless abyss, swarming with greed, cruelty and the very worst of human impulses. But hey, that's our wonderful business of show, folks.
And in "Star 80", his final film as a director, he found the perfect true story to evoke his world view.....the brief, doomed life of movie starlet and Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten, brutally murdered by Paul Snider, her lowlife psychopathic husband-manager.
Stratten and Snider, superbly brought to life by Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts, each in their own way were seduced by the promise of fame, glamour and success. Dorothy's a sweet naive innocent blessed with the most marketable commodities of showbiz, a beautiful face and body. Snider's a bottom feeding hustler who latches on to Dorothy as his golden ticket to the razzle-dazzle and boundless wealth promised to those who can push their way into the entertainment industry hierarchy.
Anyone who's watched any of the versions of "A Star Is Born" can see these characters destinies are practically pre-ordained. Dorothy rapidly moves up the Hollywood food chain to bigger and better projects while the showbiz bigwigs speeding her way to the top already spotted Snider as a worthless parasite. Shunned, cast aside and his dreams denied, Snider's rage comes to a full boil......much like Joaquin Phoenix's 'Joker' and Robert DeNiro's demented fanboy Rupert Pupkin in "The King Of Comedy".
Bob Fosse, in films like "Lenny", "Cabaret" and his own semi-autobiography "All That Jazz" always tried to show us the emptiness (and sometimes downright evil) of showbiz razz-ma-tazz.....to smear off the greasepaint , the precision dancing, the eye catching spectacle to reveal there's nothing of real value underneath......
Which makes the blood splattered tragic conclusion of "Star 80" represent the inevitable and exact end result of how he viewed the world of entertainment........a con, nothing but a smoke and mirrors magic trick perpetrated to separate the suckers from their money. Fosse didn't just want to entertain us to the point of breaking into rapturous applause, he wanted to rub our noses in the unspoken falsehood and insincerity he experienced from living a lifetime in performing arts.
(And I don't want to leave out some of Fosse's savvy casting choices here, including Cliff Robertson smoothly playing Hugh Hefner and Carol Baker, herself a movie sex goddess of the 1960's, as Stratten's mother. The film's only stumble is Roger Rees playing an up and coming British director enamored with Stratten.....his character's an obvious watered down (to avoid lawsuits) version of real life director Peter Bogdanovich, who cast Stratten in his stillborn Audrey Hepburn comedy 'They All Laughed'. His ongoing love affair with her while she was still married to Snider, touched off Snider's murderous rage.....)
Not an easy film to sit through by any means, , but "Star 80" still stands as its director's most personal work.....and therefore a 4 star (****) essential.
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