Sweet Charity

Great Sets, choreography, music, cast. "If They Could See Me Now" is worth the price of admission. "I'm A Brass Band" is also a highlight. Somewhat depressing story line makes this a happy/unhappy experience. But if you haven't seen it, give it a whirl. I hear the DVD has an alternate ending, which may be a good idea!

In Sweet Charity, Shirley MacLaine plays Charity, the original hooker with a heart of gold. Well, that's not entirely true; Sweet Charity is a remake of the Italian film The Nights of Cabiria, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 1957. In any case, the hooker with a heart of gold archetype is embodied by the protagonist in this story.

While the Italian film is depressing beyond belief—Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the movie and have seen it many times—the musical is slightly different. There are many dramatic, depressing musicals, and this isn't one of them. It's fun and colorful with uplifting songs, a lighter title, and a generally sunny disposition. I won't spoil anything, but if you're looking for a downer, try Oliver instead.

Shirley MacLaine is darling! I know, it seems like I'm always talking about how cute she is, but she is particularly adorable and charming as Charity. Shirley got her start as a dancer, and in this movie, she's able to really show off her skills (and her legs). It's a Bob Fosse musical, so if you've never seen his choreography before, prepare yourself for a very different type of dancing. Dancers will stand perfectly still for several beats, breaking the stillness by a single shoulder shrug or finger flick. It's a very controlled, intense, stylized kind of dancing, one that uses a Hollywood camera to its advantage. The dance numbers are beautifully directed and framed in each shot. Usually, you'll either love Bob Fosse or hate him, so it might be a determining factor in your enjoyment of the film.

It's difficult to pull off the heart of gold hooker role convincingly. In my opinion, Giulietta Masina conveys the "seedy hooker" aspect of the character a little better in the original version, but it's also a darker, sadder film, so that makes sense. In Sweet Charity, Shirley MacLaine chews gum and sports a heart tattoo on her shoulder, but that's about it. Still, she nails the hopeful, utter faith in human nature aspect, which delights audiences and draws them into her story.

When I first watched the movie, I wasn't really too impressed with the songs. Now that I'm older and have written three musicals myself, I actually like Cy Coleman's and Dorothy Fields' creations better. For me, part of what makes an effective musical song is if the melody conveys the words of the song, even if the words are hidden. In "Big Spender", the famous song all the streetwalkers sing to a potential customer, the melody captures the boredom they feel, as well as the frustration simmering underneath. You can really feel it's a song that's been sung a hundred times a night. In "If They Could See Me Now", another famous song that Shirley MacLaine sings with a top hat and cane, it actually sounds like it's being sung on her tiptoes, while she's excited and afraid if she shouts it'll echo off the walls. And finally, one of my favorites, "There's Gotta be Something Better Than This": you can truly feel the frustration boiling over as the girls finally declare they've had enough of their terrible lives. To see what I mean, watch the YouTube clip of the song, and if you like it, rent the movie!

Sure, Bob Fosse sometimes indulges in trendy late-60's stylistic touches like freeze-frames and crash-zooms. Some of the jokes by Neil Simon are corny, and Shirley MacLaine can be a little hard to take sometimes. The film also suffers from the bloated, over-produced quality that infected most 60's major studio musicals.

The dull non-musical scenes are a chore to sit through, but when one of Fosse's amazing production numbers begins, Sweet Charity soars into the sublime. Fosse was quite simply a genius, and the great showcase numbers such as "Hey Big Spender" and "Rich Man's Frug" are as brilliant as any dance numbers ever put on film.

Shifting configurations of dancers, contorted body poses, dance steps that are by turns awkward and graceful, a studied contrast between clustering dancers and separating dancers -- it is hard to describe the magic of the Pompeii Club sequence. I've always felt that Fosse's choreography has the same sense of space and volume as Cubist painting.

Fosse's camera placement and camera movement capture an ideal "in-the-round" feeling of choreographed numbers that one cannot experience in the theater. For a first-time film director, Fosse revealed an amazing facility for the form. Usually theater directors don't take to the medium of film as quickly as Fosse did. Usually, theater directors make visually unexciting films that feel stage-bound. Not Fosse -- Sweet Charity, despite some flaws, doesn't play like a filmed stage play, it has the visual panache of Fellini and Godard.

Sweet Charity was just a warm-up, Fosse's personal film school at Universal's expense, before he truly mastered the form of film-making with the classic Cabaret.

This is loaded to the brim with that dancing and just general idiosyncratic "cool" feeling that made Fosse who he was as a creator. "Big Spender" and "If My Friends Could See Me Now" are all-timer Musical numbers in film history. And yeah, a couple of the numbers have certainly dated (hearing Sammy Davis tell a bunch of Broadway Hippies to "Sock it to me" in the "Rhythm of Life" number is worth a major eye-roll), plus Fosse's attempts to do uh La Jetee type still image montages at a couple of points. However, Shirley MacLaine is often so moving in a role that others might have played a little less intensely felt (what sold me was the job interview scene, which is just about perfect, but her comic timing is impecable). She's adorable but also very serious as a person, which is hard to pull off. It's big and flashy and a little bit silly (I like to call Ricardo Montalban Casanova Khan in this), and the director jumps off from Fellini and Neil Simon (in a Peter Stone script) for as much audacious advantage as he can. Not all of it works, but it's far from a "disaster" like Pauline Kael called it. 7.5/10

I notice that uncredited, but still making a vital contribution to this film was the original Broadway lead Gwen Verdon who assisted her then husband Bob Fosse with the choreography. This has to be one of the truly unselfish acts in a business that's built on ego.

Sweet Charity ran 608 performances on Broadway with a flock of Tony Award nominations including Gwen Verdon for the lead of Charity Hope Valentine and two Tony Awards for Bob Fosse for direction and choreography. Fosse came over to Hollywood to repeat his dual roles. But instead of Gwen doing the lead, Shirley MacLaine steps into the part and Gwen assists in the choreography. Quite frankly had she told Universal and her then husband to take their film and follow explicit directions what to do with it, who could have blamed her.

Yet there was Gwen Verdon, helping another performer do good in a part she created. Shirley MacLaine did do good in the role and it was a return to MacLaine's own musical roots. Shirley MacLaine has done so many dramatic roles and been Oscar nominated and once a winner for them, people do forget her beginnings were musical. Had she come along ten years earlier she would have been a great musical star. As it is she does have films like Can Can, Artists and Models, and What A Way To Go where we see Shirley singing and dancing. Her first big break was on Broadway replacing Carol Haney in Pajama Game.

Charity Hope Valentine, someone who is charging more than 10 Cents a Dance Depression prices in a dance hall keeps having the worst luck in men which is established early on when at the beginning a guy she was just getting interested in threw her off a bridge into Central Park lake and robbed her purse. The latest in a long line of romantic failures. But quite by accident she gets involved with two men, Italian film star Ricardo Montalban and insurance actuary John McMartin who is repeating his role from the original Broadway production.

The Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields score is a bit cut down, but you couldn't do Sweet Charity without Hey Big Spender and If They Could See Me Now. In the latter Shirley's musical talents, singing and dancing, get their full range. It must have been something however to see Gwen Verdon cavorting around the Italian film star's apartment doing that soliloquy of finally hitting the big time and wishing her dance hall girls could see here.

As for the dance hall girls, Shirley's peers are led by best friends Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly who along with Shirley do the big production number of Hey Big Spender. Who wouldn't want a little quality time with any one of them.

And we get a special treat with Sammy Davis, Jr. doing the Rhythm Of Life church, a satire on those who claim religious tax exempt status for some interesting beliefs. It maybe his best musical moment in film.

The ending for a musical is rather unusual, I can't reveal, but nothing similar comes to mind at the moment. Though Shirley MacLaine is great, poor Gwen Verdon died having only had one of her Broadway hits filmed, Damn Yankees.

But Gwen was quite the girl helping someone else score a hit with her role.