Sweet Charity

Shirley MacLaine is excellent in this underrated, brassy musical based on the Italian classic film, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA.

MacLaine plays Charity Hope Valentine, a sweet but rather clueless woman who works in a dance hall but yearns for love. She's constantly linking up with men who use her, take her money, dump her. The film opens with Charity in Central Park with her "boyfriend." Sitting on a bridge, she chirps about making a wish and throwing something off the bridge. The creep shoves her into the water.

She has two wiser-but-cynical pals, played by Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly. They seem resigned to their fates as dance hall girls but there's still an ember of hope for a better life.

Charity meets an Italian film star (Ricardo Montalban) and spend the night with him ... in his closet. She then meets a repressed man (John McMartin) in a stalled elevator and seems to have found happiness at last..... But is happiness in the cards for Charity? MacLaine seems to channel Gwen Verdon (who starred in the show on Broadway and who worked with MacLaine on the dance numbers) and excels in the many productions numbers, especially "If They Could See Me Now" and "Somebody Loves Me at Last." MacLaine also has a spirited rooftop dance number with Rivera and Kelly as they opine "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This." The show-stopper is probably the "Big Spender" number which features MacLaine, Rivera, and Kelly with a line of dance hall girls who try to lure men to be their partners. It's a sensational number that shows Bob Fosse's choreographic skills and also demonstrates the cynical life of a dance hall girl.

Other great numbers include MacLaine and Montalban's visit to the Pompeii Club where the dancers go through a series of landmark Fosse dances. The lead dancer here is the sensational Suzanne Charny. Among the dancers are also Ben Vereen, Lee Roy Reams, and Chelsea Brown.

Sammy Davis turns up the heat with the "River of Life" number which shows Charity and Oscar (McMartin)seeking meaning and discovering the 60s counter culture. Then there's Stubby Kaye as the dance hall manager who throws Charity a wedding party and sings "I Love to Cry at Weddings." This is a hugely underrated musical filled with great music and production numbers. Big, bright, brassy, and brazen, what's not to love? MacLaine won a Golden Globe nomination.

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

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.

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!

Bob Fosse's first opportunity to direct a movie was the 1969 film version of his own Broadway musical SWEET CHARITY, a musical based on the film NIGHTS OF CABERIA, with a book by Neil Simon and music by Cy Coleman and Doothy Fields. The story is best described by the film's subtitle: "The Adventures of a Girl Who Wants to be Loved". Shirley MacLaine, taking over the title role from Fosse's wife and muse, Gwen Verdon, plays Charity Hope Valentine, a pathetic thing who has worked as a taxi dancer in the Fandango Ballroom for eight years and has basically been a doormat to men all her life. As her friend Nickie (Chita Rivera) explains, "You run you heart like a hotel...you got men checking in and checking out all the time." The story is told in a series of amusing and touching vignettes which lead to Charity meeting the possible man of her dreams, a milquetoast named Oscar Lindquist (John McMartin, reprising his Broadway role). This film died at the box office in 1969 and I'm not sure why except for the fact that this was a period when musicals just weren't being made anymore and that's a shame because the movie is extremely entertaining, thanks to the bravura performance by MacLaine as Charity and the extraordinary choreography by Bob Fosse. I can watch this movie over and over again just to watch the dance numbers. The raw sensuality of "Hey Big Spender"...the angular, disjointed and pointed moves of "Rich Man's Frug"...the Broadway exuberance of "There's Gotte be Something Better Than This", exuberantly danced by MacLaine, Rivera, and Paula Kelly...the brilliant jazzy classic Fosse moves of "Rhythm of Life"..and the pure joy of "I'm a Brass Band." All of Fosse's choreographic signatures are present here...the hats, the gloves, the turned in feet, the disjointed body parts, the expressionless dancer faces, it's all here to be watched and studied and marveled over. For dance purists and Fosse devotees, SWEET CHARITY is a must.