Welcome to the Fossethon! For info on the blogathon as a whole, please go to our delightful and inviting hub page. Below is part II of my mammoth first submission to the Fossethon. To start at the beginning, see this post.

When it’s discussed at all, Sweet Charity is often described as something bordering on a false start for Bob Fosse. A little more accurately, it’s also often seen as a necessary learning experience, in which Fosse learned that the traditional musical was deader than a doornail.

It’s true that he never again allowed one of his film characters to break into song. From Cabaret on, musical numbers in Fosse films were always motivated — they happened on a stage, as part of a rehearsal or public performance or, in the case of his final musical scene ever put on film, in Fosse’s own mind. Even on stage, Fosse became progressively less comfortable with traditional musical comedy — the stage version of Chicago takes place almost entirely as a performance. It contains a story, but no drama.

While Fosse’s later film strategy is definitely related to the commercial failiure of Sweet Charity (exacerbated by Fosse’s habit of going drastically over budget), that fact that he was compelled to save the traditional musical by destroying it with the realism of Cabaret does not render Sweet Charity a lesser film. As one of the very rare stage adaptations that actually work as pure cinema, it’s an undiscovered classic and a disregarded milestone.

Moreover, because it is a traditional musical and an actual comedy, more or less, it’s able to do things that later Fosse films simply aren’t permitted to. It’s a real toy train set of a film, filled with zooms, pans, crazy angles, wild sets and outright spoofery. Admittedly, the film starts off on some slightly twee notes as Shirley MacLaine’s Charity romps for God knows what reason in a department store window during the credits, and continues romping through an all-too real Central Park while singing “My Personal Property,” an up-tempo hymn to New York City.

The sweetness ends quickly, once Charity’s latest no-good boyfriend steals her savings and knocks her into a lake, though even that moment is played too jokily for its own good, relying on pat stereotypes of apathetic New Yorkers, as most onlookers continue about their business, leaving the job of rescuing Charity to nearby athletes. (The equivalent sequence in Nights of Cabiria has its gallows humor, but it’s also suspenseful and raw. Cabiria actually seems to stop breathing until her rescuers revive her. Despite dialogue to the contrary, Charity never appears to be in any real danger.)

After that, it’s off to the Fandango Ballroom and Fosse, who came of age performing in burlesque houses, is suddenly at home. From that point on, Sweet Charity becomes much more than a pleasant stage musical adaptation. The film’s first great number, “Hey Big Spender” had Fosse doing things that his heroes, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, would never have permitted. It’s a travesty on the traditional musical and a four minutes of cinema mastery, that also shows us exactly why Charity, a dance hall employee for eight years, needs to escape. There is no fun to be had here.

Fosse starts slowly, using a typical Fandango Ballroom customer as our guide through the sad, comically nightmarish world of the dance hall. The stage director and choreographer has apparently been taking notes from his days as a dancer and nascent choreographer at MGM and Warner Brothers, as well as from his interest in European New Wave cinema. He keeps his camera moving, employing eccentric, Fellini-esque shots of his oddly sinister chorus girls, jazzy dissolves, and, sinning against Saints Kelly and Astaire, he cuts frequently once the dancing begins.

Much worse, he does not always shoot his dancers from head to toe, sometimes breaking down individual movements and body parts. He obscures his dancers with artfully placed beer glasses and cigarettes and all but turns the camera into a musical instrument — percussively editing, as in the rhythmic cutting on the words “fun, laughs, good times.”

Although it influenced MTV and Baz Luhrman-style ADHD musicals, the cutting fits the tempo, it doesn’t overwhelm it. More important, The effect of Fosse’s cinematic play is not to diminish the contribution of the dance or the excitement of what his dancers are doing, but to amplify it.

After this high point, Fosse does something he would do less and less over the years, he allows his audience to identify with a nice person. We return to Charity, who is crying, followed by a Truffuat-esque montage that threatens to turn mawkish but doesn’t, thanks to the simplicity of Shirley MacLaine’s performance. It’s also a bridge to the next sequence, showing us that Charity has had some time to get over her heartbreak before the next, more comic, sequence involving Ricardo Montalbán’s movie star, leading to another masterpiece of razzle-dazzle (count how many times that expression comes up in any discussion of Fosse) — the almost too tongue-in-cheek, probably too long “Rich Man’s Frug” sequence.

It stops the movie dead in its tracks, but it’s a pause that invigorates. It goes on for five unnecessary, exhilarating minutes of deliberately eccentric cutting, more eccentric dancing and, perhaps most importantly of all a brilliant set (which was a regular feature on the Universal Studios tour for several years after) and lighting design probably inspired both by Fellini and Andy Warhol’s Factory. “Rich Man’s Frug” is excessive in the way that Quentin Tarentino fans should appreciate. It’s the “House of Blue Leaves” sequence, sans dismemberment.

And so it goes, for several more terrific numbers, which either develop the story or not, from old school showcases originally written for Gwen Verdon, “If They Could See Me Now” and “I’m a Brass Band,” to the relatively traditional, Jerome Robbins/West Side Story-ish powerhouse showcase for Chita Rivera, Paula Kelly, and MacLaine, “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This,” to the Sammy Davis set piece, “The Rhythm of Life” which seeks to spoof countercultural religions and, updating quickly from film to stage, the burgeoning hippie movement. “Thou shalt not blow thy minds on school nights and national holidays” is funny stuff, but it doesn’t really speak to world of Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman. It’s also hard to imagine real hippies tolerating the Quincy Jones style blend of jazz-pop and mock-liturgical music.

Through all of this lunacy, however, the film retains it integrity, remaining theatrical but never stagy, and hanging on to the thread of Charity’s quest for true love. The dancer’s search is embodied by her reluctant, mildly neurotic suitor, Oscar Lindquist (prematurely gray eternal character actor John McMartin). Oscar is seemingly the only person in New York more naive than Charity, though it’s a willful naivete and, ultimately puritanical and self-destructive. Oddly, Fosse biographer Martin Gottfried sees the purity-obsessed Scandinavian-American would-be lover as an extension of the half-Norwegian-American sex addict Fosse. And it’s here where the film becomes less jokey, a bit more personal and, with its use of an unusual amount of acoustic guitar music for a glitzy musical, almost contemporary.

For all of his testing of the visual and aural boundaries of acceptable musical comedy cinema, director Fosse has managed to make a personal and affecting film — even if much of its power is borrowed from a genuine masterpiece of world cinema. Just as in Fellini’s film, the moment when the tearful Charity/Cabiria, once again abandoned, finds it in herself to share a happy moment with a group of flower children (another bow to the times), we realize that, at least in some sense, she’ll always be okay. Her goodness will, in some sense protect her. It won’t protect here from cruelty by others, but it will protect her from the worst fate of all — becoming cruel herself. (And this is where I admit that, even just doing screencaps of the conclusion, I can’t see even five seconds of this scene without bawling like a little girl. Sad, but true.)

With all its glitz and sometimes broad comedy, and for all of Fosse’s contained savagery, Sweet Charity, is a nice film about a nice person. But what about it’s maker…and whose closer to the real Bob Fosse, the basically gentle, only incidentally cruel and repressed Oscar, or the vicious, self-hating killer and husband of Dorothy Stratten? We know he’s not Charity.

In Part III: Star 80 at the Other End of the Telescope