Gwen Verdon, where are you? Shirley MacLaine is good (but not great) as the replacement for Gwen in this mixed-bag of a film adaptation directed by Bob Fosse. It's too bland. Charity is a hooker in the Broadway version, but here she is a "taxi dancer" who occasionally goes in for the "long haul" with regulars like "Charlie". The scenes are G-rated so a great opportunity with Latin Lover Ricardo Montalban is lost. Shirley plays "Charity Hope Valentine" the girl with the proverbial heart of gold. She appears wide-eyed-and innocent in spite of her sordid profession. Her long-lost "love", Oscar Linquist, is played by John McMartin. He's an insurance actuary, an incredibly boring and strange man who claims to "love her for what she is" but gets cold feet on the way to the marriage license bureau. (The "Charlie" red heart tattoo on her shoulder sure doesn't help.) John's lack-luster performance rivals that of Van Johnson's in "Brigadoon". It "cools down" the movie, especially the last 20 minutes. The ending stinks also. After the "flower children" wish her a cheery "Good Morning" she skips down the lane, on her merry way, after staying out all night on the footbridge where she used to meet her sweetheart. It's way too long. (157 min.) The musical production numbers are quite good because they are directed by the genius Bob Fosse. "Hey Big Spender" is the stand out. Sammy Davis Jr. appears in a great cameo as a singing and dancing "soul man hippie" preacher. However, there is too much dialog in-between all the music. Universal considered this a "bomb" as it lost money at the box office. Even Stubby Kaye (as the dance hall owner) couldn't save this one.

This film captures poignancies -- the ineffable yearnings of a woman who has been burned in love, the challenges of escaping one's past, the energy and grandeur of New York City, the sadness and waste of conventional thinking.Shirley MacLaine coruscates as a woman with a past. (Is there a female alive who has not experienced Charity's manic elation over a man who is not available?) Also wonderful in their roles are Ricardo Montalban as a suave romantic and John McMartin as the first regular guy Charity ever dates.The song and dance numbers in this film are infectious and mesmerizing. My 12-year-old son started watching out of the corner of his eye, taking breaks from a video game, and got hooked. (Tells you something, doesn't it?) I loved every one of these extravagant interludes, but none could surpass the new-age church scene featuring Sammy Davis Jr. as Big Daddy.Forty years ago as a high-school junior I was part of the chorus in a community production of "Sweet Charity. What a pleasure it was to have the music and lyrics flowing back into my consciousness.This is one exquisite film.CODA: -- "I was going to be an assistant dental technician."-- "That doesn't sound very impressive." -- "It does to a dance-hall hostess!"

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.

The strengths of this movie are obvious to anyone who watches it. First are the marvelous song and dance routines that are full of energy and beautifully performed. My only criticism is that a few of them went on a little bit too long – which made the movie itself a bit too long - but for the most part they were very entertaining. The movie also featured very strong performances. The primary star, of course, was Shirley MacLaine as the lead character, Charity Hope Valentine – a "dance club hostess" (actually, I was not entirely clear if her duties might have included prostitution; it was never explicitly stated, although it was suggested). Good male performances (in lesser roles) were offered by John McMartin as Oscar, who falls madly in love with her but in the end can't marry her, and Ricardo Montalban as Vittorio, an Italian movie star she meets by accident and is smitten with, although there is obviously no future for her in the relationship. In an even lesser, but quite funny, turn was Sammy Davis, Jr. as "Big Daddy" – the leader of some sort of hippy-style religious group.The story itself left me with mixed emotions. Adapted from a stageplay, I personally thought it still felt too much like stageplay – to me, the medium of the big screen wasn't used well enough. The story began by telling us in an opening caption that Charity is a girl who desperately wants to be loved. It proceeds through some of her adventures as she seeks love. To be honest, it took me a while to get into this, and it wasn't until the appearance of Montalban's Vittorio that I really started to get interested in the story. Once the story grabbed me, though, I found myself rooting for Charity. She was a truly sweet character who deserved love. I had an interesting reaction to her search for love. I'm usually put off by the needlessly romanticized endings Hollywood often offers us in such movies. Here, though, I really wanted that happy ending for Charity, and I felt a little deflated when Oscar dumped her. I got the point of the ending. Finally, Charity found love – she learned to love herself; she didn't need a man. The message fit the tenor of the times (1969) in which the movie was made. The woman who once needed a man to feel good about herself finally becomes self-sufficient. Yes – I get it. It's a different kind of fairy tale ending, as the closing caption tells us that Charity lived "hopefully ever after" rather than happily ever after. I was still rooting for her and Oscar, though! All things considered, I'd give this a 7/10 for pure entertainment value.