Bob Fosse (1969)

When a film’s on ITV in the small hours, they usually have a man signing it for deaf viewers.   The presence of this miniature figure is utterly destructive to suspense:  we gave up after a minute of Don’t Look Now a few months ago.   But I thought it was worth persevering with Sweet Charity – it’s decades since I last saw it but I hoped that wordless sequences and vivid singing and dancing would be in sufficient supply to eclipse the dun-coloured homunculus in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.   He kept getting in the way of people’s heads in close up but there were compensations:  he really entered into the spirit of ‘The Rhythm of Life’ and his constancy on screen gave a small new dimension to the heroine’s unavailing search for a man she could rely on.  I look forward to ITV screening The Artist at 2am, years from now, although it’s possible there’ll be a cameo for someone to sign  ‘Wiz pleasure’.  In the meantime, I’m really pleased we didn’t give up on this recording and delay seeing Sweet Charity again.  Pleasure is what this film gives abundantly:  as I watched, I kept realising I was smiling.

The original stage production of Sweet Charity was a big hit on Broadway, where it ran from early 1966 to mid-1967, but the film was a box-office flop:  it cost $20m and recouped only a fifth of that.   You can see why it wasn’t a simple crowd-pleaser:  Bob Fosse’s choreography and hyperkinetic camerawork may have seemed odd and disorienting; there’s also the unhappy ending.  (According to Wikipedia, Fosse filmed an alternative, upbeat ending in case Universal wouldn’t accept the real one.)  Yet the commercial disaster still seems surprising.   Sweet Charity has a first-rate, highly varied song score (words by Dorothy Fields and music by Cy Coleman) and clever, often funny dialogue (Peter Stone adapted Neil Simon’s book for the stage musical).  The marvellous dancing includes sequences that are easily enjoyable as well as the stylised Fosse movement that may have been too innovative for most tastes.  The romantic story, based on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, is strong and Shirley MacLaine in the leading role gives one of her very best performances.

The film is also of great interest as Fosse’s screen directing debut and for the ways in which it anticipates Cabaret:  in ‘Big Spender’ the attitudes of the dancers-for-hire at the Times Square Fandango Ballroom foreshadow the look of the Kit Kat Klub girls.  Although the look of Sweet Charity doesn’t have anything like the power or the coherence of the visual scheme of Cabaret, Fosse and his cinematographer Robert Surtees get across in the Fandango sequences some of the same tension between glitz and shabbiness.   There are occasional resonances with Cabaret in details of the orchestration too.  Fosse had choreographed three movies in the 1950s (My Sister Eileen, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees) but one assumes it was his success with the Broadway Sweet Charity, which he directed and for which he won a Tony for his choreography, that allowed Universal to entrust him with the screen version.  Given the scale of its financial failure, it seems a miracle of film history that Fosse was given a second chance with Cabaret.

The Fosse dance style – with angularity and sinuousity equally exaggerated – is especially conspicuous in the amusing, socially satirical ‘Rich Man’s Frug’ number.  His stop-go rhythms (the alternation between withholding of movement and physical release, thereby heightening both the tension and the dynamism of the dancing) are used in exciting combination with the music in each of Sweet Charity’s three best numbers.  All of these – ‘If They Could See Me Now’, the ‘America’-ish ‘There’s Got To Be Something Better Than This’ and ‘The Rhythm of Life’ – are elating.  The light-hearted martialness of ‘I’m a Brass Band’ doesn’t give him the same opportunity and the number goes on too long but it’s redeemed by an affectingly diminuendo ending, as the figure of Charity recedes down a city sidestreet.   Fosse makes expressive use of the constrast between variously constraining indoor settings (the Fandango, the wardrobe where Charity’s secreted by the film star Vittorio Vidal, the lift she gets stuck in on her first meeting with Oscar Lindqvist, an all-night diner, more than one phone box) and the possibilities suggested by the scale of the city streets outside and the height of the buildings.   The whirling camera movement is sometimes too much but the use of freeze frames, although it seems dated now, is often emotionally effective in what it captures in the expressions and gestures of Shirley MacLaine.

The risk that the actress in the role of Charity Hope Valentine, the funny, sweet-natured, shopsoiled-but-innocent loser, will condescend to the character she’s playing can hardly be overestimated.  Casting Shirley MacLaine as Charity may not have been imaginative but it was the best imaginable way of eliminating that risk.  She is completely empathic with Charity.  She’s also a great comedienne whose comic effects are always rooted in character.  There are many marvellous things about this performance:  for example, MacLaine invests Charity with a strong streak of awareness that things aren’t going to work out but that awareness doesn’t detract from her determined optimism or from the sadness of things going wrong again.  If MacLaine’s dancing doesn’t have the effortless snap of Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly as Charity’s co-workers in the Fandango, it’s still very good; besides, the relative effortfulness connects with Charity’s personality.   Her singing isn’t vocally brilliant but it’s tuneful and appealing.   Dorothy Fields’ lyrics are consistently witty and gently incisive.  Shirley MacLaine interprets them with such understanding that this is one of the relatively few musicals in which the musically unmremarkable, talking-to-myself numbers – like ‘It’s a Nice Face’ – are compelling because you feel they’re genuinely telling you more about a character.  (It’s a pity, though, that ‘Where Am I Going?’, the very last number, is the weakest of the lot.)

As the well-mannered, anxiously strait-laced Oscar Lindqvist, who wins and breaks Charity’s heart when he flees their City Hall wedding, John McMartin repeats his stage role.   It’s tough for McMartin that he has to be spectacularly neurotic virtually as soon as he appears on screen – in his attack of claustrophobia in the stuck lift – but he’s a fine partner for MacLaine once Charity and Oscar start dating.  McMartin gives Oscar a persistent underlying selfishness that gives an edge to his mild bachelor niceness and helps to makes his eventual rejection of Charity inevitable rather than merely predictable.  Chita Rivera is essentially a stage performer and it shows in her line readings; as the warm-hearted but wary Nickie, her vocal rhythms are very set compared with MacLaine’s.  The same goes for Paula Kelly, although, like Rivera, she’s likeable and a splendid dancer.   Ricardo Montalban is easily funny and charming as the Latin heartthrob Vidal.  Stubby Kaye is a bit too benign for the role of Herman, the manager at the Fandango:  this reduces what should be the impact of surprise in his ‘I Love To Cry At Weddings’ number, although it’s still jolly enough.  Sammy Davis Jr has just a few minutes of screen time as Big Daddy, the high priest of the Rhythm of Life movement, but they’re not ones you’re likely to forget.  The dancers include Ben Vereen, who went on to great success as the star of the Broadway production of Pippin in 1972, Bob Fosse’s annus mirabilis.

30 March 2012