When Charity (Shirley MacLaine) isn’t dancing at the Fandango Ballroom, she’s desperately on the search for love. When we first meet Charity, she’s positively elated over the fact that she thinks she’s finally found the love of her life. But when they meet up on a bridge in Central Park, he pushes her off the bridge and robs her. It’s an experience that would make a lot of people want to completely give up, but not Charity. She still has faith that her one true love is out there and isn’t about to let anything get in her way of finding it.
One night, she runs into movie star Vittorio Vitale (Ricardo Montalban). He had been planning to go out with his girlfriend Ursula, but when they get into a fight, he winds up going to a club with Charity instead. He takes Charity back to his place for dinner and Charity can’t believe her luck, but then Ursula drops by and Charity spends the rest of the night hiding in Vittorio’s closet.
Charity’s night with Vittorio only makes Charity more determined to better her life. When she decides she wants to leave the Fandango Ballroom, she goes to an employment agency. But while she’s there, she ends up getting stuck in an elevator with Oscar Lindquist (John McMartin). After she helps him cope with his claustrophobia, she and Oscar begin seeing each other. Once again, Charity thinks she has found what she’s been looking for, but there’s just one problem — Oscar doesn’t know about her job at the Fandango Ballroom. He’s under the impression that she works in a bank.
Soon enough, he finds out the truth and he tries to be okay with it. They plan to get married, but after he goes to her farewell party at the Fandango, he realizes he can’t marry her. Left alone at the marriage license bureau, Charity starts walking home completely heartbroken. But as she walks through Central Park, she realizes that she shouldn’t give up hope just yet.
On the surface, Sweet Charity has much to offer. Shirley MacLaine was perfectly cast as Charity and with Bob Fosse directing, you know it’s got to be loaded with style and panache. However, this was the first time Bob Fosse had directed a film and it showed. Sweet Charity would have greatly benefited from being about twenty minutes shorter. No matter how marvelous MacLaine was or how stylish the dance numbers and costumes were, those things simply weren’t enough to hold my attention through the full two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
The Hollywood Revue 
Hi Angela – like your review of Sweet Charity! There is an interesting history about the ending of the movie, in case you never heard it. I saw the movie when it was first released at the theatre — when it was on TV years later, it had an entirely different ending! I thought I was crazy, but I KNEW that ending with the young people in Central Park, and Charity finding strength to go on, was not the original. It wasn’t! Originally, Oscar did leave her, but then there was a wonderful scene in his apartment when he has the same reaction he did in the elevator — claustrophia, couldn’t breathe. He ended up hanging his head out the window. It was very funny. He realized then that he really did love and need Charity, and they would be married. I think that was the original Broadway ending, although I can’t swear to it.
I never understood why on earth they changed it! I thought the Central Park ending was lame, and it didn’t really fit the story. Perhaps they changed it to fit the hippie era, or be more realistic, or who knows why … but I didn’t like it. Do you know anything about why they did that?
There were indeed two different endings to Sweet Charity. The version you described where Charity and Oscar end up together was filmed just in case the studios insisted on a happy ending. But Bob Fosse thought that ending was too cheesy and wanted the other ending in Central Park with the flower children. That ending is much more in line with the ending to Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, which Sweet Charity was based upon.
Do you happen to know which ending was used in the original Broadway musical? Boy I’m being lazy, I just realized. I could just look it up myself! LOL
I’ve never seen a stage production of Sweet Charity, but according to Wikipedia, the stage version ends with Oscar pushing Charity into the water. But when she gets out of the water, she realizes that he didn’t rob her like the first guy did and she goes right back to being her hopeful self.