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Charity Hope Valentine (Shirley MacLaine) works as an erotic dancer and sometimes prostitute and is constantly unlucky in love. Whatever the disasters in her lovelife, she compensates with a rich fantasy life in which she dreams of meeting a man who will take her away from the sleazy world of the dancehalls. Based on a stage musical scripted by Neil Simon, which in turn was based on Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria.” “Sweet Charity” is a highly enjoyable screen musical which points to the new direction the musical film was to take in the ‘70’s. Fosse maintains the Broadway plot but he choreographs a stunning series of dance routines around the songs “Big Spender”, “There’s Got to be Something Better than This”, “If My Friends Could See Me Now” and a wonderfully hippie version of “Rhythm of Life” sung by a New Age minister played by Sammy Davis Jr. In “Sweet Charity” Bob Fosse is beginning the experimentation with dance and music which was to lead to his groundbreaking work in “Cabaret.”
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How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
306422
Language
English
Audience classification
G
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Colour
Holdings
VHS; Access Print (Section 1)