Sweet Charity (1969): a musical for its time and ours (Review)

Put yourself in the mind of a moviegoer in 1969. At the time, it seemed like Hollywood was dying, struggling to compete with new, disruptive home-entertainment innovations. Even if they didn’t exist, though, the industry would be in trouble. Studios were ruinously focused on spectacle-driven tentpole films that were often too expensive to recoup their budgets. Audiences were increasingly seduced by foreign cinema. The American public, divided along racial and generational fault-lines, felt the old white men in charge of the studios didn’t know what they wanted to see. On top of all this, there’s a flu pandemic.

Phew! Try to wrap your head around all that happening at the same time… and now sit down and watch Indicator’s new Blu-Ray of Sweet Charity. Of the three different cuts on the disc, choose the one with the overture, so you can imagine taking your seat to a medley of themes from Cy Coleman’s score. And then, just as you’re prepared to watch exactly the kind of over-budgeted roadshow musical that late ’60s Hollywood was regularly embarrassing itself with, the opening credits start with a blast of energy – freeze-frames! Psychedelic colours! – and a lead performance from Shirley MacLaine that’s completely compelling before she even speaks, let alone sings or dances.

There are points during the wildly packed, discursive two-and-a-half hours of Bob Fosse’s debut film when I wondered if he was single-handedly trying to unite a divided country. Maybe he was – it’s not as if he was ever knowingly unambitious. Sweet Charity has all the traditional pleasures of a Tinseltown musical: blinding technicolor, a knock-’em-dead lead performance, a script from Neil Simon, who does this kind of sharp-but-gentle wit better than anyone. It’s also got nouvelle vague-style montages of photographs, Sammy Davis Jr. wearing a shirt Andre 3000 would consider a bit loud and a picaresque structure derived from – of all the un-Hollywood influences – Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria.

Even in the less rigorously censored film industry of 1950s Italy, Fellini had trouble securing financing for a script where the lead character was a prostitute. No surprise that Simon and Fosse tone MacLaine’s Charity Hope Valentine down to be a dancer-for-hire at a vaguely sleazy New York dance hall. Even so, she cuts a risky figure in the world of 1960s musicals, whose most iconic heroine is a nun played by Julie Andrews. It’s MacLaine’s breathless energy that saves her, easily persuading you that Charity’s reckless pinballing between unsuitable men is the product of naive, romantic optimism. One of the two new songs written for the film, ‘It’s a Nice Face’, sees her contemplating the features of John McMartin’s claustrophobic Oscar while he lies on the floor, having passed out in terror from being stuck in a lift. It’s quiet, sweet, and so innocent it could have been sung by Shirley Temple, rather than MacLaine.

Given that Richard Fleischer’s Doctor Dolittle had somehow received a Best Picture nomination two years earlier, it really is unforgivable that MacLaine didn’t receive an Oscar nod for this, or indeed that the film as a whole wasn’t nominated outside technical and musical categories. It might also be that the Academy – or the public as a whole – weren’t ready for Fosse’s deconstructive approach. Those who know numbers like ‘Hey Big Spender’ or ‘If They Could See Me Now’ as pop standards will have their heads in a whirl when they see how Fosse stops and starts them here, incorporating foley sounds into the former in the manner of Chicago‘s legendary ‘Cell Block Tango’, and pausing the latter twice so Ricardo Montalbán (yes, Khaaaaaaannnn) can pass her the top hat and cane she needs to dance with in an outrageous meta-gag.

Sweet Charity is the work of someone who is so in love with musicals, so effortlessly fluent in their secret language, that he can’t resist taking them apart and showing you the inner workings like a garage mechanic who’s just souped-up the engine on some old wreck. And without Fosse, the musical genre would have been an old wreck by 1970. For all Sweet Charity wasn’t the box office hit it deserved to be, in retrospect it announces Fosse’s determination to make the musical into a form that could stand proudly alongside the gritty, experimental New Hollywood that was already being born. Rather than retreating and making something safely commercial, he came back three years later with a film that was even more taboo-busting, even more harshly realistic and even more daring. That film was Cabaret – and this time the Oscars would sit up and pay attention.

Indicator’s extras include, well, everything. As with a lot of their older titles, they excavate a one-reel cutdown of the film which was sold to private cinema clubs. In the past, these one-reelers have struggled to condense two-hour thrillers; the 150-minute sprawl of Sweet Charity‘s plot is mangled so much it resembles some kind of Rose Hobart-style experimental re-edit, but three of the musical numbers are included in their near-entirety, which is what counts. There’s also a fascinating interview from 1968 where Sammy Davis Jr. thoughtfully expounds on the state of race and politics in America, a feature-length 1970s interview with MacLaine, a fascinating alternative ending, a short featurette about Fosse making the leap from stage to screen, thoughts on the film from Fellini in the accompanying booklet, and so, so, so much more.

Thanks for reading our review of Sweet Charity

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