by Eric Blume
Fifty years ago today, audiences saw their first Bob Fosse film: Sweet Charity, the Cy Coleman/Dorothy Fields musical for which he won the Tony for Best Choreography three years earlier. It’s fascinating to look back at this movie five decades later to see all the seeds that Fosse later brought to fruition in his subsequent films...
Sweet Charity was adapted from one of Federico Fellini’s greatest films, 1957’s Nights of Cabiria (if you haven’t seen it, please watch post haste… a stunner). In many ways, the musical was a startlingly faithful adaptation from the film, although instead of the movie’s beautiful pathos, the musical filled in the blanks with bland musical theater humor from bookwriter Neil Simon, which, let’s just say, has not held up well. But what Sweet Charity does have is a killer score from Coleman and Fields, songs that just seem to get better over the years. Sweet Charity isn’t a great musical, but it delivers where it counts, in the musical numbers, and the film, despite its many flaws, serves as a solid cinematic preservative of this score.
Towards the end of his career, Fosse would remark about how much he loved cinema, and how he found he felt he could do so much more in that medium than in the theater. So with Sweet Charity, you get a very messy cocktail: Fosse is like a kid in a candy store with a camera…it’s as if he never thought he’d get to make another movie, so he tries EVERYTHING: dissolves, freeze frames, stills, flash pans, the whole kitchen sink. You can see his passion, and you can see pedestrian attempts at framing that he perfects just a few years later in Cabaret and Lenny.
Shirley Maclaine as "Charity," the role created on Broadway three years earlier by Bob Fosse's then-wife Gwen Verdon
One thing Fosse has no sense of with Sweet Charity is pacing: he lets scenes go on endlessly, with no snap or verve. And he lets Shirley MacLaine go with no leash, which is rarely a good thing. MacLaine can be a superb actress with the right circumstances. But when she doesn’t have the support, her acting can be unbearable, and Fosse is tentative about directing her. She embellishes every moment: she’s overly tearing, overly moxie, overly cute, overly winning.
Sweet Charity is basically two movies: one half contains the absolutely fantastic musical numbers, and the other half contains the dialogue scenes. It’s insane to see the two side by side, because they feel conceived and shot by two different people. Fosse, already a 5 time Tony award winner as choreographer/director at this point in his career, has beautifully thought through all the dance numbers in cinematic terms: his blocking and choreography work in sync with his camera placement. Everything is purposeful, and you sense his early mastery: he knows when to lock off the camera, pan, isolate, and use editing to maximize the excitement of the music heighten the storytelling within the number. Unfortunately, more than half of the movie are the “book scenes” which are laboriously executed. They lack the pockets of humor and passionate force that the musical numbers have, and they sometimes border on the tortuous.
Chita Rivera and cast perform the immortal "Big Spender" in SWEET CHARITY (1969)
But the film gives us “Big Spender” with its thrusting hips and deadpan humor; the thrillingly-staged “Rich Man’s Frug” which almost any other director would have cut from the movie; the fun rooftop dance in “There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This”; and the highlight of hour two, “The Rhythm of Life” with a hippie Sammy Davis Jr. and some flashes of the razzle-dazzle that would become Fosse’s trademark.
Fosse only directed five films, two of them complete masterpieces (Cabaret, All That Jazz) and two others that scale extraordinary heights (Lenny, Star 80). Sweet Charity is the least of them, but we’re lucky to have it as a time capsule of superb musical theater songs, excellent choreography, and the beginning strokes of a film master whose cinema career ended far too soon with his death in 1987.
Fosse/Verdon, a miniseries exploring Bob Fosse's creative and romantic partnership with the dancer Gwen Verdon premieres Tuesday April 9th on FX. TFE will be covering the series each week and episode 1 centers around Sweet Charity so check it out before the series airs if you've never seen it.