Thanks for the memories!

Simply Perfect

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I really liked this movie until the ending. Yes, the original ending in the Broadway show and the film has an unhappy ending, but for me it just doesn't work. The character of Charity is such a sweet person and she deserved a happy ending. This is not WEST SIDE STORY. Having an upbeat motion picture and it ending like it does with Charity having no future is not what the audiences in 1969 wanted to see. In the end Charity she has no husband, job or friends. What kind of future does she have? The only ending for Charity is to kill herself. I think the unhappy ending hurt the film's box office. People left the theatre feeling real depressed. What a downer. The alternate ending was uplifting and left you feeling good.

I had not seen Sweet Charity since 1969. I remembered enjoying the movie, but I did not remember it that well. I recently saw it again on DVD. It is a incredible movie. Boy! can Shirley MacLaine sing, dance, AND act. She not only pulled my heartstrings, she yanked them. Bob Fosse does the choreography. It is more playful and less synchronised and whiplike than in Cabaret. Every dancer does something subtly different. It is like a three ring circus. The choreography is just so inventive. He tries things you never see anywhere else. Then Cy Coleman composed song after song after song that sent a surge of emotion when I heard the first few familiar bars. The music is so interesting, all kinds of polyphony, and interesting variations, not just mindless repetition. The movie has a sad theme, Charity looking desperately for a partner, and being so eager she takes the first man who comes along, and of course the relationship blows up in her face. I have certainly been there, though I had not the first time I saw the movie. Perhaps that's why Sweet Charity impressed me so much more the second time. Sammy Davis Jr. is a hoot as Big Daddy, worth the entire price of admission. It is shocking just how much love and effort they put into this film. It is so much better than I remembered it. Perhaps I have not seen anything like it in such a long time.

Neither this movie nor the two endings are that good in my book, I never saw the Fellini movie that "Sweet Charity" is based on and I love a sad, "realistic" ending as much as the next person. But with the way this movie is written, it doesn't make sense to me for Oscar to leave Charity hanging at the altar.Maybe if he found out what she does for a living after he asked her to marry him it would make more sense. Then he might feel some obligation to go through with the marriage even though he was having serious second thoughts, and that could lead to him backing out of it at the last minute. But the way this movie is written, he not only found out about her life before asking her to marry him, he found out before he told her he loved her. There were no serious ties between them, he had all the time in the world to keep dating her and mulling it over (if he wanted to use that time), yet he still came to the conclusion that nothing else mattered and they had to be together.To me that isn't the thought process of a man who is going go flip-flop on his decision. And if he does flip, what's to stop him from flopping right back hours later and deciding he was a fool for leaving Charity ... which brings us back to the alternate end.Like I said, neither end is satisfying to me. But at least the alternate one makes more sense. In the original one even Oscar can't explain why he's leaving her.

I notice that uncredited, but still making a vital contribution to this film was the original Broadway lead Gwen Verdon who assisted her then husband Bob Fosse with the choreography. This has to be one of the truly unselfish acts in a business that's built on ego. Sweet Charity ran 608 performances on Broadway with a flock of Tony Award nominations including Gwen Verdon for the lead of Charity Hope Valentine and two Tony Awards for Bob Fosse for direction and choreography. Fosse came over to Hollywood to repeat his dual roles. But instead of Gwen doing the lead, Shirley MacLaine steps into the part and Gwen assists in the choreography. Quite frankly had she told Universal and her then husband to take their film and follow explicit directions what to do with it, who could have blamed her.Yet there was Gwen Verdon, helping another performer do good in a part she created. Shirley MacLaine did do good in the role and it was a return to MacLaine's own musical roots. Shirley MacLaine has done so many dramatic roles and been Oscar nominated and once a winner for them, people do forget her beginnings were musical. Had she come along ten years earlier she would have been a great musical star. As it is she does have films like Can Can, Artists and Models, and What A Way To Go where we see Shirley singing and dancing. Her first big break was on Broadway replacing Carol Haney in Pajama Game.Charity Hope Valentine, someone who is charging more than 10 Cents a Dance Depression prices in a dance hall keeps having the worst luck in men which is established early on when at the beginning a guy she was just getting interested in threw her off a bridge into Central Park lake and robbed her purse. The latest in a long line of romantic failures. But quite by accident she gets involved with two men, Italian film star Ricardo Montalban and insurance actuary John McMartin who is repeating his role from the original Broadway production.The Cy Coleman-Dorothy Fields score is a bit cut down, but you couldn't do Sweet Charity without Hey Big Spender and If They Could See Me Now. In the latter Shirley's musical talents, singing and dancing, get their full range. It must have been something however to see Gwen Verdon cavorting around the Italian film star's apartment doing that soliloquy of finally hitting the big time and wishing her dance hall girls could see here.As for the dance hall girls, Shirley's peers are led by best friends Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly who along with Shirley do the big production number of Hey Big Spender. Who wouldn't want a little quality time with any one of them.And we get a special treat with Sammy Davis, Jr. doing the Rhythm Of Life church, a satire on those who claim religious tax exempt status for some interesting beliefs. It maybe his best musical moment in film.The ending for a musical is rather unusual, I can't reveal, but nothing similar comes to mind at the moment. Though Shirley MacLaine is great, poor Gwen Verdon died having only had one of her Broadway hits filmed, Damn Yankees.But Gwen was quite the girl helping someone else score a hit with her role.