The second movie that TCM is showing on June 18 that I happen to have on my DVR but hadn't yet blogged about is the musical Sweet Charity. It comes on at 5:30 PM on June 18, so now is the time to do the post on it.
Shirley MacLaine stars as Charity Hope Valentine, and as the movie opens we see her singing and dancing her way across Manhattan, briefly pausing to look at wedding rings, and then ending up at one of the bridges in Central Park to meet her boyfriend and soon-to-be fiancé Charlie. Except that the meeting doesn't go as well as planned. Charity may think she loves Charlie, but the feeling isn't quite mutual. Charity has taken all of her money out of her savings account, and Charlie steals her purse, pushing her into the pond below. Naturally, everybody there thinks she's attempted suicide.
Now, Charity ought to be able to give the cops Charlie's name, and one would think she knows where he lives, so the police could pick him up. But Charity seems to want to forget the whole thing, this being simply the latest in a series of bad-luck relationships with men. Charity works as a taxi dancer in an era that I didn't realize still had taxi dancers in places like midtown Manhattan. Her best friends at the dance hall, Nickie (Chita Rivera) and Helene (Paula Kelly), try to give her good advice, but Charity doesn't seem able to take the advice.
Luck may be about to hit her, however. One rainy evening as she's walking in Manhattan, she comes across movie star Vittorio (Ricardo Montalbán) as he's breaking up with his girlfriend Ursula. He offers to take Charity in his limousine back to his place, which is a swanky house in Manhattan that looks like it's would be worth seven figures even back in 1969 when the movie was released. This gives Charity to perform one of the two standards from the musical, "If They Could See Me Now". (How much of a standard it is is that I first learned of the song from Kathie Lee Gifford singing it in commercials for Carnival Cruises.) But Vittorio has a reconciliation with his old girlfriend that spoils everything for Charity.
She decides to leave dancing and get a real job, except that she has no skills whatsoever. As she's leaving the employment agency, she gets trapped in an elevator with Oscar (John McMartin), an actuary. The two fall in love, and the relationship blossoms to the point where they plan to get married, with another big production number at the old dance hall where Charity worked. And they lived happily ever after... or did they?
Sweet Charity was based on a Broadway musical, which in turn was based on the late-1950s Italian movie Nights of Cabiria. Bob Fosse directed and did the choreography for the stage musical, and Universal brought him out to Hollywood to direct the movie. This was Fosse's first foray into film directing, and one thing that he shows here is that he was an oustanding choreographer, as all of the dance numbers are intricate and very well handled.
The bad news, however, is that the rest of the movie is an absolute mess. (To be fair however, I had a lot of difficulty getting through Nights of Cabiria.) There's very little story here, and all of the song and dance numbers stop the movie dead in its tracks, making it feel bloated is it runs to 149 minutes. (TCM's showing tomorrow is from 5:30 to 8:00, so assuming it starts right on time they should be able to fit it in that slot. The recording I have is from Dave Karger's Saturday musical matinee slot, so with his intro and outro it pushed things out to about 152 minutes into the recording and was given a 2:45 slot.) Fosse's direction is not up to the level of his choreography, as he badly misuses the camera for dissolves, already evident in the opening musical number, and scenes where the camera holds on still images for no discernable reason.
It's easy to see why critics panned Sweet Charity, and why it was a box office flop back in 1969. Some people, however, will still be able to find Fosse's choreography and Shirley MacLaine's exuberance enough to make the movie worth their while.
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