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PUKE For how long had Shirley MacLaine played icky variations of Charity before she finally made many of us puke in Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity? Went to Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia and counted at least fourteen and possibly up to eighteen movie roles which could qualify. This has to be why we find her repellant: her sap has us recoiling as we sense she’s thinking how wonderful and adorable she is at being the daffy loser-broad with a heart of…well, we really can’t hide our contempt anymore. She’s not the sole reason for the musical’s failure, as it becomes clear Fosse’s jitters as a first-time movie director are more central. Privately visualizing the hoary story one way, he filmed it for the most part conventionally and in the process converted his nicotined, manic discipline into television dance commercials. (There’s one imaginative outlier: the 5.51 minute “Rich Man’s Frug,” a hip takeoff on the “Ascot Gavotte” in My Fair Lady.) A depressing pall hangs over the musical book’s rotting kitsch, some of it lifted from Westside Story and Gypsy; if his followup Cabaret a resurrection of substance and concentrated style, Sweet Charity is phony-loud with decomposing substance, similar to the gaudy Irma La Douce, reminding that dancing hoes warbling “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This” just doesn’t cut it as a brassy yet melancholic sing-a-long begging for big spenders. Inexplicably opening as a roadshow, its doom was set not only by the unwelcomed overdose of MacLaine, who proceeds to be at her worst opposite John McMartin doing Dick Van Dyke as her love interest, but also by the obviousness this particular production, with her parading around what looks like NYC’s financial center as a drum majorette(!), is ineffably anachronistic. Fosse would later ask in defense of himself: “How do you make a G-rated musical about a prostitute?” He wasn’t helped by the publicity over his squabbles with movie executives over which ending to use: A Hooker Happily Married at Last, or the Ditched at the Alter kind? (As if the audience would give a shit after seeing MacLaine in her white-daises-on-a-blue-wedding dress screamer. YouTube offers up the happier ending in case you can’t help yourself.) Neil Simon wrote the musical’s book, adapted from Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria; screenplay by Peter Stone; Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields wrote the score. The cast includes Chita Rivera, Sammy Davis, Paula Kelly, Stubby Kaye, Ricardo Montalban, Ben Vereen. Filmed in Panavision, with 70mm blowup. (Opening 3/27/1969 at the Palace, running 13 weeks.) Oscar noms for Best Score for a Musical Picture Original or Adaptation, Art-Set Decoration, Edith Head for costuming. ROLLOVER IMAGE
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER (Revised 9/2025) All Rights Reserved. |
