Sweet Charity

Sweet Charity is, in short, a terrific musical film. Based on the 1966 legituner [by Neil Simon, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, based on Federico Fellini's film, Nights of Cabiria], extremely handsome and plush production accomplishes everything it sets out to do.

A very good musical that should have been a great musical. Bob Fosse, making his film directorial debut, couldn't convey the verve he injected into the play to the movie version.

No masterpiece, but a generally underrated musical all the same.

This has a lot of good ingredients but just doesn't quite manage to pull it off. It's looks dated and Shirley Maclaine doesn't quite capture the sympathies of all audiences.

Although Shirley MacLaine tries hard, it's obvious that her dancing isn't up to the demands of the role. It's a disaster, but zoom-happy Fosse's choreographic conceptions are intensely dramatic, and the movie has some of the best dancing in American musicals of the period.

Sweet Charity, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical, has been so enlarged and so inflated that it has become another maximal movie: a long, noisy and, finally, dim imitation of its source material.