Taxi dancer Charity Hope Valentine (Shirley MacLaine) tries to have hope despite being pushed into a lake by her boyfriend Charlie. She meets the Italian movie star Vittorio Vitale (Ricardo Montalban) but his volatile statuette girlfriend returns. Then she's stuck in an elevator with flustered Oscar Lindquist (John McMartin). She tries to keep her real life a secret from him.Shirley MacLaine is great and there are a couple of terrific songs like 'Big Spender' and 'If They Could See Me Now'. She is a really funny broad. This is Bob Fosse's movie directorial debut. He shows that he can stage performances. The pacing does drag a little here and there. MacLaine is always there to pick up the movie when that happens. There is an alternate happy ending filmed. The movie works either way and its fun to see both.

Shirley is endearing as the title character, a sweet overly hopeful hard luck dame not overly burdened with brains. Several of the songs-Where Am I Going?, Hey Big Spender, If They Could See Me Now, are excellent but the film is an overblown terribly dated dinosaur. The kind of out of touch production that killed the musical by the end of the sixties. A gargantuan flop upon its initial release costing 20 million and taking in only 8, it's easy to see why peppered throughout as it is with techniques, photos that stop the action dead, freeze frames in numbers, that were outdated even then. There are glimmers of Fosse's genius scattered here and there but he has done better work elsewhere. One of the very rare chances to see Chita Rivera on screen, for that alone it's worth sitting through once but it really a mediocre effort.

"Sweet Charity" is about the adventures of a terminally optimistic 'woman of easy virtue' (Shirley MacLaine) who seems to be happy no matter what horrible things are thrown her way. While the prostitution angle is highly de-emphasized (which is odd, given it was made in the later part of the swinging 60s and in the original she was CLEARLY a prostitute), she is a 'dance hall hostess'. But she also is very dumb--a terrible judge of character and some one who always seems to be bouncing from one problem to another. Through the course of this film, you hope that somehow things will finally work out for this sweet but ditsy lady."Sweet Charity" is a hard sell for me. This is because the musical is based on Fellini's film "Nights of Cabiria"--a technically well made but incredibly unpleasant film that I saw twice. Why twice? Because it is very, very highly touted as one of his best films but one that left me so depressed that I couldn't understand why anyone would want to actually watch it. Imagine--the film is about a sweet prostitute who is constantly being abused, disappointed and degraded. Not pleasant stuff, that's for sure.It's also a hard-sell because it's a movie so deeply entrenched in the late 60s that it has not aged well. The best example is the bizarre dance numbers that occur when the Italian actor (a miscast Mexican-born Ricardo Montalban) takes her to a trendy club. The dance numbers look almost like a combination of Italian high fashion of the day which is performed by a bunch of Twiggy-like models and was designed by Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon!! It may have seemed really cool in the day, but now it just comes off as bizarre...very, very bizarre. And, very slow...as the dancers keep blank expressions while they move in a manner that requires the minimum of energy! It's just strange and goes on, seemingly, forever.Now I did not thoroughly dislike the movie--but I did dislike it. MacLaine was cute in the lead (though, oddly, her singing sounded very tinny and canned--but she could sing well so I don't blame her for this). And, if you love modern dance, then you'll most likely like the film--it just wasn't my taste but I could respect the effort it took to make this. Overall, not a particularly enjoyable film...at least for me.

This zany "tart-with-a-heart" story is something of an undiscovered gem. I'd never seen it on TV, before catching it recently on TCM.Made in 1969, the action takes place at tail-end of the 60's flower power era, though the anachronistic situation and predicament of the Charity, the "dancer-for-hire" and her associates comes direct from the 1950's. In fact, the constrained lives and world-weariness of the dancers and their poignant attempts to escape their hum-drum lives contrasts sharply with the fast-developing and affluent culture all around them.The musical numbers by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, including "If My Friends Could See Me Now", "I'm a Brass Band" and "Hey, Big Spender", are simply stupendous and would grace any top-quality musical score. The "pièce de resistance" is, however, Sammy Davis Jr's astonishing cameo in "Rhythm of life", which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and has had a new lease of life lately after being used in commercials.As for the dancing, I'm not usually a big fan outside of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, but I found the dance routines entertaining, inventive and startlingly original, if not to say witty. It's certainly given me a whole new appreciation of Bob Fosse.It's a long film and there are times when it seems to drag a little, but MacLaine exudes a certain bruised charm which keeps us interested in the story and it's characters. In fact, at it's heart, the plot concerns a dilemma that all of us should be familiar with: when things aren't going well, is it possible take stock of our life and change it for the better?