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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 as many as eighteen movie roles which could qualify. This has to be why we find her repulsive: our familiarity about her movie sap is worked to the max, we’re supposed to just hand ourselves over to 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. Probably 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. A depressing pall hangs over the rotting kitsch, some of it lifted from Westside Story and Gypsy. There’s one imaginative exception: the 5.51 minute “Rich Man’s Frug,” a takeoff on the “Ascot Gavotte” in My Fair Lady. (Available at youtube.) His followup Cabaret a resurrection of substance and concentrated style, Sweet Charity is phony-loud style with decomposing substance, similar to the gaudy Irma La Douce. Inexplicably opening as a roadshow, its doom was set not only by the unwelcomed overdose of MacLaine, who proceeds to be just about 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 about what 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 All Rights Reserved. |
