Wilkommen to Fossethon! For info on the blogathon as a whole, please see the hub page. Below is the first part of a three-part post to kick things off.

Bob Fosse’s first film as a director was a corny, poignant, and hysterically inventive portrait of a dance hall hostess whose openness and belief in love causes heartbreak, but also ensures her emotional renewal. It was a financial disaster.

Bob Fosse’s final film as a director (released, not coincidentally, 11/10/1983, the start date of this here Fossethon) is a bitter, horrific, compelling and somewhat repulsive story of a man whose self-hatred radiates upon the world and ultimately causes him to commit an unspeakably grisly murder/suicide. The victim is a near saintly Playboy playmate whose openness and belief in love and mercy permits her destruction. People didn’t care for that one much, either.

A lot of things happened in between Sweet Charity and Star 80, a lot of it in the world and and a lot of it in Bob Fosse’s head, or perhaps I should say his tortured soul. While I’ll try to avoid too much psychobiography (in this post, anyway), the two films make an intriguing contrast as the unsuccessful bookends of a wildly successful career.

It’s a long story. First, some history.

I seem to be the only person who knows it, but Sweet Charity is the last, great traditional film musical of the 20th century. Before that, however, it was the Broadway play that turned Bob Fosse from a successful and original choreographer and occasional director into the theatrical equivalent of an auteur.

Fosse had been moved by Federico Fellini’s tragicomic Nights of Cabiria, and it was his concept to turn the scrappy, Chaplinesque prostitute, Cabiria (Giulietta Masina), into the sweet natured dime-a-dance girl Charity Hope Valentine. Fosse leveraged his choreographic success into his full directorial post and wrote an early draft of the show himself, though he had never really written anything prior.

Fosse saw that his own book would never work, so he turned to gag-writer turned superstar playwright and show doctor Neil Simon, who finished the book and received sole writing credit. Broadway critics and audiences agreed — the result was a slick, funny piece of work that also featured some of Fosse’s best dance numbers and a tour de force showpiece for his wife and primary choreographic muse-collaborator, Gwen Verdon. A movie sale of some kind was all but inevitable and through the burgeoning power of show business management and perhaps through the intercession of Shirley MacLaine, would play replace Verdon as Charity, Fosse was allowed to direct by MCA-Universal. All hail Lew Wasserman. The only problem: nobody realized it was the sixties.

Screen to stage.

Bob Dylan had already “gone electric” by the time Sweet Charity opened on Broadway in January of 1966. Fosse and his cohorts may have realized that something was happening, but no one knew what it was. The Beatles’ Revolver and The Beach Boys/Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds, were still a few months away and the psychedelic revolution was just starting to grow at places like Harvard and Haight-Ashbury.

Things were moving so fast by the time the film version of Charity went into production, it’s understandable that busy show biz professionals would miss it. It’s hard to believe now for younger people, but compared to the sixties, today’s mostly technology-driven cultural shifts are sort of gentle.

Here’s what I mean: I was a schoolyard freak for a lot of reasons, but one of them was my identification with the music of my parents — big band, show tunes and, if we really wanted to go moderne, Burt Bacharach. Around the time of the film version of Sweet Charity, this was a very bad thing. The only show-tunes it was permissible to like at Mar Vista Elementary, circa 1969 or so, came from Hair. Any old-style popular music, anything resembling a pop standard, was uncool and corny beyond belief. Only rock and soul music and, perhaps, folk and blues, were in any real. That was the world of young people. In the world of the untrustworthy over-35 crowd, Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack still may have seemed like the hippest guys around, but not to the youth. And, even then, they bought most of the movie tickets.

As if overcompensating, Sweet Charity was cluelessly and expensively promoted as an ultra-swinging, super-hip, time capsule of a movie-musical. True enough, except that it was a time capsule from the early sixties, which might as well have been the Restoration Era. Every asset the film had was also a liability. Shirley MacLaine was a legitimate box office draw, but she was also a member of the Rat Pack, ladies auxiliary. Even worse, second billing was given to Sammy Davis, Jr., who performs one song as a jazzy would-be soul messiah.

Jesus of cool?

As a full-fledged member of Sinatra’s gang, Davis was in the process of becoming a figure of mockery for his infamously sycophantic talk-show appearances — a walking symbol of everything that was wrong with show business and, by extension, the older generation and “the establishment.” Nor did he earn any hipness points for his skin color; he was a Jewish convert who hung out with whites, themselves unconsciously racist squares who made jokes about his race and short stature. The fact that he was nearly as good a singer of pop standards as Frank Sinatra and as great a dancer as any member of his generation only worked against him with the youth audience.

Still, it’s not hard to see why Davis’s part was so heavily promoted. He was a name and a huge draw in Las Vegas. The actual costars of Sweet Charity — John McMartin, Chita Rivera, Paula Kelly, and Stubby Kaye — were highly talented New York players whose presence on a marquee meant absolutely nothing outside of Manhattan. The only exception was movie “Latin lover” turned TV mainstay Ricardo Montalbán, who plays an Italian movie star who Charity literally bumps into.

(Montalbán is the very best kind of ham actor but he’s never been a draw in my lifetime. Not that it would have helped much, but Khan Noonian Singh was still a little known character from a single episode of a failed TV series in ‘69, and Mr. Roarke and “rich Corinthian leather” were still a long ways away….well, maybe it’s just as well.)

The fact of the matter was that Easy Rider would not be released for another three months, so the news of a major cultural shift had not yet reached mainstream Hollywood. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both killed during the production of the film, but Fosse was so involved he refused to cancel shooting on either day, (though, according to MacLaine, he did use the Kennedy assasinnation to wring tears out of her). Still, who knew?

Coming in Part II — I talk a little about the movie, finally.