SWEET CHARITY 1969

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for discussion

Although I started out as a film major in college, sometime around my sophomore year the dance bug bit me, and I wound up with a career as a professional dancer. Small wonder then that movie musicals have come to mean a great deal more to me than just escapist entertainment. They represent the convergence of my twin passions.

The first movie musical to really make me sit up and take notice of the genre's potential for expressing the grand emotions of joy, longing, and love was Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity. Granted, I was just 12 years old at the time (1969 – balcony of the Embassy Theater, Market St., San Francisco), so what did I know about grand emotions of any kind? Still, no film before had ever given me such a roller-coaster thrill-ride of emotions packed into a single cinematic experience. I mean, I remember getting goosebumps just from the way the film opened with the Universal Studios logo fading in to the accompaniment of a choral/orchestral crescendo. It was all so overwhelmingly theatrical it didn't feel like a movie at all, more like an event!

Charity and her "Charlie" tattoo: Decades before every man, woman, child,
and grandparent could be found sporting hipster body ink

Then unfamiliar with the show's score or any style of dance that wasn't of the sort seen on TV variety shows like Hulabaloo or The Jackie Gleason Show; I was thrilled to find Sweet Charity to be a catchy and kinetic melding of traditional musical theater and a stylized form of contemporary discotheque dancing. It instantly transported me into a groovy, very '60s world of color, movement, music, and spectacle. I was so taken with the whole thing, I don't think my mouth closed once over the course of the film's two-hour plus running time.
I sat though Sweet Charity twice that day, returning the following week to see it two times more. Thereafter, I sought it out whenever it aired on television or made an appearance at a local revival theater. To this day it remains one of my favorite screen musicals, although now more due to nostalgia and all that iconic Fosse choreography than out of a distinct fondness for the movie itself.

Shirley MacLaine as Charity Hope Valentine

John McMartin as Oliver Lindquist

Sammy Davis, Jr. as Big Daddy

Ricardo Matalban as Vittorio Vidal

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
A victim of really bad timing, Sweet Charity was pretty much raked over the coals by the critics and ignored by the public when it was released. The New Hollywood was just emerging and young audiences were making hits of small, groundbreaking films like Easy Rider & Midnight Cowboy. In this atmosphere of gritty naturalism, Sweet Charity looked elephantine, dated, and more like entertainment geared toward your mom and dad. And for a film released in the early days of the dissolution of the Censorship Code, Sweet Charity does come off as overly modest. Indeed, 1931's Ten Cents a Dance (a Barbara Stanwyck pre-code movie) is a good deal less coy about the life of a dance-hall hostess than this 1969 feature that tiresomely skirts around the fact that sweet ol' Charity may have turned a trick or two in her quest for true love.

Omen Unheeded: Maybe the set designer was trying to give Fosse a hint, but in this scene from Sweet Charity this 1967 issue of Time magazine - featuring a cover story on Bonnie & Clyde and The New Cinema - sits in ironic counterpoint to the old-fashioned antics occurring onscreen.
Movies like Bonnie & Clyde spelled the end for big-budget Hollywood musicals.

But the passing years have been kind to Sweet Charity. In the wake of Nine and Burlesque and the fact that virtually no one appears to know how to make a decent musical nowadays, Bob Fosse's $20 million folly now looks endlessly inventive and borders on genius by comparison. Most everything that's pleasing about Sweet Charity Fosse would hone and polish to greater effect in Cabaret, but it's all there: Fosse's unique ability to make the camera a part of the choreography, his love of tableau, the use of color and space, the eye for detail....

Jazz Hands Jamboree

Whether or not you like the results, the one thing you can't help but appreciate about Fosse is that he's a man who respects and understands the potential of the musical genre.

PERFORMANCES
For many years I really considered Shirley MacLaine's performance in Sweet Charity to be one of her best. But much in the way that the film itself plays better if you've never seen the Fellini masterpiece upon which it is based (1957's Nights of Cabiria), MacLaine's Charity is a lot more persuasive if you've never seen her in 1958's Some Came Running. They're essentially the same role. The major difference being that MacLaine in Some Came Running is touching and tragic, while her Charity Hope Valentine leans toward a somewhat strenuous waifishness, and can prove more than a little exhausting.

I recall a movie director once making the observation that audiences want to root for a character who is  struggling NOT to burst into tears. MacLaine (like Diana Ross' equally moist performance in 1978's The Wiz) explodes into mascara-streaked tears so often that by the third or fourth outburst, you've grown somewhat numb to her heartbreak. MacLaine is very good in Sweet Charity, but her performance virtually screams "Oscar Bait" (although nominated for Some Came Running, MacLaine wasn't so lucky with Sweet Charity). Also, in rehashing a characterization she perfected in a film made 10 years earlier, the older MacLaine, failing to bring anything new to the mix, misses an opportunity to mine the inherent poignancy in the life of an aging "good-time girl."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Sweet Charity has a killer musical score. Those six notes comprising the intro to "Big Spender" are as iconic and recognizable as the Jaws rumble or that Strauss-meets-monolith surge in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Aside from the disposable "Rhythm of Life" number, I enjoy all the music in Sweet Charity... the arrangements all being very much of the moment (that being the go-go '60s) and terrifically energetic.

"It's ME! Charity!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The dancing! The dancing! The dancing! Bob Fosse is my all-time favorite choreographer. The genius on display in "Rich Man's Frug," "Big Spender," and "I'm a Brass Band" makes this film a musical classic no matter what its flaws.

OK, so it's a shameless rip-off of West Side Story's rooftop "America"
number, but it's still a lot of fun

Big Spender: Anthem to assembly-line sex

"Big Spender" is seriously a mind-blower. Contemporary theatrical revivals of the show always seem to get it wrong. This isn't a SEXY number... it's a number about mechanized sexuality. The women on the bar are robotically spouting the words the "johns" want to hear while lifelessly assuming postures of fake sexual allure. The bar and the louche poses of the dancers have become instantly iconic, but for an all-time favorite, the "Rich Man's Frug" number still can't be beat.
You can watch it a hundred times and still find more to catch the eye and captivate. The dancers' technique is impeccable. If you doubt it, take a gander at the DVD of the 1999 Broadway revue, Fosse. "Rich Man's Frug," recreated by some of Broadway's best dancers, is almost jarringly clumsy by comparison. The overly muscular frames of the contemporary dancers are no match for the lithe-yet-strong movie dancers who interpret Fosse's precise isolations. The dancers in the 1969 film are like liquid dynamite.

"Rich Man's Frug" - It helps to know what the 60s dance called "The Frug"
really looked like in order to know just how witty this number is.

Mention should be made of Sweet Charity's alternate "happy ending" (included as an extra on the beautifully restored DVD release). Fosse fought hard and won to keep the film's bittersweet ending, in which Charity is abandoned by her suitor yet remains hopeful about life and love. This duplicates the heartbreaking ending of the Fellini film.

I think I might be alone in feeling that Sweet Charity would have been a better film with the happy ending, which Fosse thought too corny.

The sad ending was right for Fellini's film because Cabiria's (Giulietta Masina) desire to change her life spoke to the film's broader, quasi-religious theme that spiritual redemption is possible only after divesting oneself of all material possessions.
Cabiria is conflicted about making her living as a prostitute: she longs for the innocence of her girlhood, but is nevertheless proud of the independence she has achieved through her work. She is aware that her tiny home and savings are all that separate her from a fate similar to that of the homeless aging prostitute she encounters, one of several forced to live an almost nomadic life in the many hills surrounding the town.

When Cabiria loses all her worldly belongings to a faithless lover, the movie's magical denouement hints that, at last, after all her previous efforts to find inner peace, she has a real shot at redemption and love. With nothing material left to her name, she is once again the clean, pure, innocent girl the hypnotist revealed her to be, and free to start a new life for herself.  The "sad" ending here makes sense, for it is not really sad at all...more bittersweet. The same can't be said of Sweet Charity.

The sad ending doesn't suit the musical because, for me, the film hasn't earned it. Of course, this is the ending the Broadway show gave us, but even Neil Simon (the show's playwright) has gone on record saying, "We played around with the ending a lot," and that it was Fosse who pressed for a dark conclusion. Nights of Cabiria offered pathos: a spunky post-war Italian prostitute hopes in vain to change her life. While Sweet Charity gives us bathos: the sympathy cards are so heavily stacked in Charity's corner that there is no real journey for her. She is merely set up to be knocked down.

Flower Power: The appearance of flower children in any movie was sure to date it terribly. By the time "Sweet Charity" hit theaters, the Summer of Love was already two years past, and four months after the film's release, the emergence of the Manson Family sounded the death knell of the hippie mystique.

For me, the corniest thing about Sweet Charity IS the unhappy ending! It tacks an inappropriate gravitas onto this overblown fable that feels less genuine to the plot and more like a self-conscious effort on Fosse's part to appear hip by giving us the opposite of a Hollywood Happy Ending. Granted, Fosse's ingrained cynicism is by now the stuff of legend, but it just doesn't sit right in Sweet Charity.

We've sat through a gargantuan spectacle of a musical that, despite its best efforts, is still very old-fashioned in structure and hip-deep in fantasy. Now, at the end, we are asked to be "realistic" and deny Charity the obvious happy ending she deserves. Well, in the words  of Fosse protégé Liza Minnelli, "Balls to you!"

Original Ending: Charity walks off alone but hopeful

Alternate Ending: Charity and Oscar attempt to make a go of it
 in spite of her past and in spite of his fears

A movie doesn't become more true-to-life just because it's pessimistic any more than it becomes instantly profound just because it's sad. A movie should have a consistent point of view from which the truth of the narrative is culled. As far as I'm concerned, the true ending for Charity Hope Valentine is to end up with the buttoned-down Oscar Lindquist. 

What feels most realistic to me is, in being far from a well-matched couple, there is a a bittersweet uncertainty in their actually being able to make a go of it. 

So whenever I watch Sweet Charity on DVD, the only ending that feels really authentic to me is the happy ending. Perhaps Sweet Charity was always doomed to be a flop, but I do wonder how it would have performed at the boxoffice had Fosse rewarded audiences for sitting through 2 ½ hours of Shirley MacLaine crying, with a cheerful, hopeful ending. 

Charity: "I'm nuts about happy endings!"

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

EVE'S BAYOU 1997

"Memory is a selection of images. Some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain."

One need look no further for proof of the elemental irrelevance of the Academy Awards® than Eve's Bayou, a critically-lauded motion picture hailed by many as one of the best films of 1997, yet recipient of nary a nomination. America at the time was in the throes of Titanic fever, but even the excuse of the nation's brains being reduced to mush by that film's omnipresent theme song doesn't fully explain why this gem of a film was overlooked.

My absolute favorite image from the film

A touchingly poignant coming-of-age story, Eve's Bayou is a look at the adult world as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl growing up in 1962 Louisiana. Rendered in rich period detail, it's populated with characters and language so true-to-life that you fairly gasp in recognition at seeing some long-forgotten personal memory recalled onscreen. My favorite thing about Eve's Bayou is how it so artfully (and cinematically) employs magic-realism to embrace the mystical & spiritual traditions of Creole Louisiana while giving us a glimpse into a kind of African-American family life all-too-rarely depicted onscreen.

A veritable symphony of virtuoso performances, Eve's Bayou certainly boasts one of the most talented (and sadly under-utilized) cast of actors in Hollywood.

First-time film director Kasi Lemmons (working from her own screenplay) provides her cast with the kind of substantive, dimensional roles that are extremely rare for African-American actors. Case in point: the film's biggest star, Samuel L. Jackson, is also the film's producer. Meaning that he had to essentially become his own employer in order to be offered something other than the usual "professional badass" role which has become his trademark. Take a look at some of the glowingly beautiful, expressive, and dynamic faces below and then ask why most remain unknown or are rarely visible on movie screens.

Samuel L. Jackson as Louis Batiste

Lynn Whitfield  as Roz Batiste

Debbi Morgan  as  Mozelle Batiste Delacroix

Jurnee Smollett  as Eve Batiste

Meagan Good  as  Cisley Batiste

Diahann Carroll as Elzora the Fortune Teller 

Vondie Curtis-Hall as Julian Grayraven

Roger Guenveur Smith as Lenny Mereaux

Branford Marsalis as Harry

Eve's Bayou tells the story of the Batiste family of Louisiana. The Batistes are a wealthy and educated southern family, landowners and descendants of the woman for whom the town, Eve's Bayou, was named. The father, Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson), is the dapper local physician with a roving eye; his wife, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is the town beauty. Their 3 children: Cisley (Meagan Good), Eve (Jurnee Smollett), and Poe (Jake Smollett), ages 14, 10, and 9, respectively, are loving, well-mannered, but precocious kids. (Modern parents take note: the family doesn't appear to own a television, so the kids spend a good deal of their playtime reading or acting out scenes from Shakespeare). The film is about one hot summer in 1962 when the picture-perfect facade of this respected family slowly starts to crack under the weight of several life-altering secrets.

Whispers and Secrets

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As a fan of film and an African-American male, one of the biggest frustrations I have with the medium I love so much is that when I want to see a film about African-American life (of which there are precious few), far too often I have to sit through films (well-meaning, all) telling me about how hard it is to be Black. Well, that just isn't my experience. There is nothing intrinsically hard about being Black. In fact, it's quite wonderful. It's systemic racism and white supremacy that's hard. But too many filmmakers fail to realize that making films about racism isn't the only way to frame Black Experience. Based on the image presented of the Black experience as reflected in Hollywood films, I think it would come as a surprise to many people to learn that most African-Americans do not link their identities to, define ourselves by, nor rule our lives by the racist social structure on which America was built. It impacts every facet of what happens within this society, but it is not the definer of who we are. That subtle difference is why there have been so few dimensional Black human beings in movies, but plenty of images and symbols.

When you come home and find out you've been the topic of conversation 

It's refreshing (if not downright shocking) to see a film with Black characters at the center of their own stories, not subordinate to or helping white characters. Here are people living their own lives, with desires, frustrations, and hardships born of their being human; not the result of trying to win the acceptance, approval, or understanding of a white culture that is (in this film's context) refreshingly apart and outside of the narrative's scope.
But what is perhaps most pleasing to me about Eve's Bayou is that, in being a film authentically about real African-American life (focusing as it does on family, love, loss, betrayal, pain, and growth), it does what every good film does, regardless of the race or sex of its protagonists; it illuminates something universal about what we all share and encounter while struggling with that which is called the human condition.

Family rituals

Childhood Adventures

Familial bonds

PERFORMANCES
Jurnee Smollett as Eve, the girl from whose perspective the entire film is told, gives an amazingly sensitive performance for one so young. Indeed every actor in the film is quite remarkable and several give the best performances of their careers (Lynn Whitfield). But Debbi Morgan as aunt Mozell, Eve's no-nonsense, psychic aunt with the tragic history, gives one of the finest performances by an actress in a film EVER. And that's not hyperbole. As the mystical, poetic voice of the film, she achieves tiny moments of greatness.

Mozelle, who fears herself cursed in love, mourns her three deceased husbands

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
A child's world is a world in which the real and the magical unquestioningly coexist. Not a lot adds up (things aren't fair, bad things happen to good people), but there's precious little that doesn't seem possible. The moment one learns that the world of adults is no less mysterious, yet infinitely more painful and prone to disappointment and consequence, is the moment of maturity. Eve's Bayou does a marvelous job of giving us a child's-eye-view of the mysteries of life.

"Life is filled with goodbyes, Eve. A million goodbyes. And it hurts every time."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
There's no getting past the fact that much of Eve's Bayou resonates so deeply with me because it recalls so much of my own upbringing. I was 5 years old in 1962. Like Eve, I had a dashingly handsome father who was a philanderer; and, as with all children, especially boys, I believed my mother was "The most beautiful woman in the world." Like the Batistes, I was raised to address my elders as Mr. & Mrs., and to respond to questions with "Yes, ma'am" or "No, sir."  I remember happy times with nosy grandmothers and bossy older sisters, games played, adventures shared, and the loving moments that were exclusively ours. I also recall what it felt like to be awakened at night by the sound of parents arguing in the next room. I know about whispered secrets between siblings, and the deep ties of love between us that feel so strong yet sometimes make so little sense.

 How much of remembering is as it really was, and how much is merely what we wished it to be?

Some sectors of society see images of their lives reflected from movie screens with regularity. That hasn't been the case for me, nor, I would venture to say, for a great many African-Americans. The revelation of Eve's Bayou is how it managed to put so many of my memories on the screen in such a sweetly personal way, that a simple story about the pain of growing up becomes an elegiac contemplation on the subjective quality of perception and the vacillating nature of memory itself.

" All I know is most people's lives are a great disappointment to them, and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. If there is no divine explanation at the end of it all...that's sad."

BONUS MATERIAL

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011                                    

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN 1945

"Leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her
 bosom lodge to prick and sting her."
                                                                 William Shakespeare "Hamlet"

One area in which old movies effortlessly surpass contemporary motion pictures is in their ability to render the grotesque glamorous. The value of such facility is debatable, but sometimes I want my movies realistic, and other times I want my movies to be MOVIES...in big capital letters. Due to censorship and social mores of the time, older movies had to be very artful in how they dealt with unpleasant subjects. And whether it was murder, jealousy, obsession, or infanticide; when buffed to a high gloss by the Hollywood Dream Machine, bad never looked so good.

Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent

Cornel Wilde as Richard Harland

Jeanne Crain as Ruth Berent

Vincent Price as Russell Quinton

No film better exemplifies this than that Technicolor noir classic, Leave Her to Heaven. A film of such alluring visual overripeness that one can easily forget that it is probably one of the darkest and most twisted visions of familial dysfunction ever to come out of post-war era Hollywood.

Leave Her to Heaven is a rarity in the world of 40s film noir: the darkness occurs in the bright (and colorful) daylight. And at the center of this bright-hued nightmare is perhaps one of cinema's most relentlessly evil monsters. The monster in question? None other than the austerely exquisite Gene Tierney (saved from bland perfection by a charming overbite), fulfilling, in her role as socialite Ellen Berent, the long-standing film noir edict that any female that desirable has got to spell nothing but trouble.

Femme Fatale Red Flag #23: Really big monogram 

And trouble she is, for Ellen is nothing short of a walking “attractive nuisance” violation waiting to happen. Smart, lovely and affectionate on the surface, underneath all that window dressing lies a woman with a doozy of a father fixation and a psychopathically obsessive idea of love. The object of Ellen’s affection is author Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde, a worthy competitor to Tierney in the beauty department), whom she meets briefly on a train and who soon thereafter becomes the one she MUST have.

Babe Alert! We feel your pain, Ellen.

Never mind a pesky little detail like her already having a fiancé (a wounded-looking Vincent Price).

Russell- "I'm not a man who loves often, Ellen. I love once."
Ellen- "Thank you, Russ. That's quite a concession."
Russell- "I loved you and I'm still in love with you."
Ellen- "That's a tribute!"
Russ- "And I always will be...remember that."
Ellen- "Russ, is that a threat?"

To say that Ellen’s love for Richard grows after they get married is not to state the half of it. Ellen will be satisfied with nothing less than having Richard to herself 24/7, and woe betide the woebegone (be it family members, caretakers, or wheelchair–bound little brothers) foolish enough to think she’ll allow it to be otherwise.

Wedded Bliss...or else!

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The '30s and '40s may have been boom years for the “women’s film” (movies with female protagonists, told from a woman’s point of view, marketed to a female audience) but film noir always seemed to be lurking in the shadows, contrasting all those sunny Mrs. Miniver & I Remember Mama images of femininity with vitriolic visions of women intent on the destruction of the male.

Indeed, the fear of women is what sex in film noir is all about. The twist in Leave Her to Heaven is that the almost ethereally beautiful Tierney lacks the obvious sexual threat of, say, a Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, or Barbara Stanwyck— all of whom looked as if they’d just as soon plunge a pair of scissors into your back as look at you. Tierney's Ellen Berent is the ultra- scary female writ large because she looks like so many of the pin-ups and girls-next-door of the era. Made up to resemble every brunette Gene Kelly ever pursued in a wholesome musical, it’s quite startling when Tierney reveals herself to be a sick ticket of the order rarely seen in Production Code era movies.

Sweet as pie

The "crazy eyes" first make their appearance

PERFORMANCES
Gene Tierney gives the performance of her career and is the absolute embodiment of star power in this, her Academy Award nominated role. Though her character has all the trappings of overheated melodrama (overblown emotions, ostentatious glamour), she brings a level of assuredness to her portrayal that dares you to turn it into camp. Scene after scene dances right on the edge of being a real howler on par with Lana Turner during her Ross Hunter period - or any period Douglas Sirk - but there's something about the truth of her characterization (we don't like Ellen, but we "get" her) that keeps the film on track. She's terrific.

 The famous "Swim in the Lake" sequence

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Who else? Gene Tierney. Outside of Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot, Julie Christie in Petulia, or Faye Dunaway in that big party scene in The Towering Inferno, I can’t think of another film in which a mere mortal was made to look like a fairy-tale goddess. (And if you haven’t seen Ms. Dunaway in that movie, do yourself a favor and rent it for that sequence alone. She and her cheekbones manage to upstage both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and she should have won a special Oscar just for keeping that jaw-dropping gown up.)

 Now THIS is what a movie star looks like!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If it was the intention of the filmmakers to put us off our guard by making this bleakly downbeat psychological thriller look like a picture postcard, then they succeeded. The gorgeous visuals: from art direction to costumes to locations, serve to create an almost David Lynchian look at the dark underside of a certain kind of privileged life. A certain kind of only-in-the-movies life. The effect of seeing such horrible things perpetrated by pretty people in glorious surroundings is both confounding and unsettling.

 The cinematography in Leave Her to Heaven -

David Lean meets Alfred Hitchcock

I came across this film relatively recently, and as a big fan of movies featuring overdressed bad girls, I was stunned that I had somehow missed Leave Her to Heaven in my youth (I mean, did Carol Burnett ever do a parody of this movie?). Anyway, fully expecting to be treated to a howling camp-fest of lacquered cheese, I was surprised, if not shocked, at what a powerful film it is. I mean, the various conflicts and tragedies are the stuff of melodrama, but they somehow have real emotional bite...a palpable feeling of despair. I was overwhelmed by how artfully the film was constructed and how daring its themes were. Who would ever think a major motion picture from the 1940s would include this exchange:

 Ellen- (Referring to her unborn child) "I hate the little beast, I wish it would die!"

Ruth- "How can you say such wicked things?"

Ellen- "Sometimes the truth is wicked."

YIKES! Even after watching it several times over the years, the film never seems dated (the clothes, yes, the emotions, no) and it remains one of my favorite melodramas to this day. Near perfect, its only misstep is a courtroom scene in which Vincent Price seems to be (over)acting in a different film entirely.

Undeniably dark, Leave Her to Heaven is the best example of what I call classic moviemaking: solid cast, top-notch technicians, sure-footed director, and a great script. The basics. All the CGI and 3-D in the world isn't gonna help a movie if it doesn't have these.

And I'll never let you go. Never, never, never... 

Copyright © Ken Anderson