Sweet Charity (1969)

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General		Extras
Category	Musical	Main Menu Introduction Main Menu Audio & Animation Scene Selection Animation Featurette-From The Stage To The Screen Alternate Ending Featurette-Costume Design By Edith Head Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1969
Running Time	147:35
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (80:06)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Bob Fosse
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Shirley MacLaine John McMartin Chita Rivera Paula Kelly Stubby Kaye Barbara Bouchet Ricardo Montalban Sammy Davis Jr. Suzanne Charney Alan Hewitt Dante DiPaolo Bud Vest Ben Vereen
Case	Amaray-Opaque
RPI	$29.95	Music	Cy Coleman

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French German Italian Spanish Portuguese Dutch Swedish Danish Finnish Norwegian Hebrew Arabic Russian Turkish Greek	Smoking	Yes, and lots of it. By cool people! Watch out!
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

   On the one hand, Sweet Charity is a monstrously bloated, hopelessly self-indulgent, terribly overlong, horribly dated abomination that helped pound the final nail of silliness into the leaden coffin of the musical. On the other hand, Sweet Charity is full-to-bursting with great songs, amazing choreography, and rapturously enjoyable set pieces. And if you bring those two hands together and squish ‘em, you get a maddeningly wearying cavalcade of bits and pieces you love that don’t work as a whole.

   So it’s a mess. But what’s it all about? Charity Hope Valentine, played with gusto and heart (and a wee dram of cartoonishness) by Shirley MacLaine, is a hopeless, yet perennially hopeful, romantic. She’s thirtysomething, works as a taxi dancer in a seedy New York dance hall, and has dated a succession of nogoodniks in her tireless quest for someone to love her. The plot, such as it is, is very very simple: Charity (SPOILER ALERT: highlight with mouse to read) gets dumped, then meets a nice guy, who she almost marries – only to get dumped again. And that’s pretty much it, plotwise. The rest of the near-Fellowship Of The Ring running time is filled out by a number of mostly entertaining but uniformly unimportant episodes. Charity meets a dashing-but-imperious Italian movie star (Ricardo Montalban) and goes to an insanely chic discotheque; Charity and fellow dancers Nicky (Broadway legend Chita Rivera) and Helene (the wonderfully sassy Paula Kelly) dream of a better life; Charity and nice guy Oscar (John McMartin) attend a scat-laden sermon by hippie religious huckster Big Daddy (the one and only Sammy Davis, Jnr). There’s more, of course, and plenty of splendid performers are involved – most notably Stubby Kaye as surly dance hall manager Herman.

   Most of the musical numbers are terrific; the songs are witty and catchy (except for a couple of anemic ditties penned solely for the film version), and wonderfully staged. Big Spender, If They Could See Me Now, There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This, The Rhythm Of Life, and I Love To Cry At Weddings are simply magical. Bob Fosse makes his dancers move in extraordinary ways, especially in the incredible, wordless (and from a plotty point of view, pointless) Rich Man’s Frug. This sequence essentially stops the film for a set of three dances that feature no characters and have nothing whatever to do with anything except looking good. And the sequence is great. But why is it there? Because the director loved it and couldn’t part with it, and because it offered the chance for interesting camerawork and choreography, and because it was big in the Broadway show and how could you not put it in?

   Those factors are the reason why this movie is hard to sit through twice and something like Chicago (which is based on Fosse’s original show and pays homage to his choreography) is endlessly entertaining. Chicago strives to justify its musical numbers – to make sure that they don’t break the reality of the film and that they do tell us something important about the characters even as they amuse us. Sweet Charity is constantly confused about what its numbers actually are – whether they’re part of a reality where people just start singing, or whether they’re dream sequences, or whether they’re simply on the soundtrack. The characters exist to sing the songs, no matter how irrelevant. Fosse’s experimentation with still frames, flowery captions, and montage make this a rather-too-busy film on the technical side. And the exaggeration and over-the-topness of Charity herself make the central emotional spine of the movie too weak to sustain all the excess, no matter how fabulous the pieces or how wholeheartedly MacLaine throws herself into the role. In short, Sweet Charity is best enjoyed in small doses – which is a bit of a pity, since it’s one hundred and forty seven minutes long.

Video

   The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, varying in some of the bigger numbers to 2.35:1, and is 16x9 enhanced.

   Sharpness is not terrific. Even closeups look a little soft, while middle and background details can get lost. There’s not a lot of shadow detail – but then again, there’s not a lot of shadow in this brightly lit film. No low level noise is present.

   Colours are plentiful, thanks to lavish sets, trippy lighting and Edith Head’s striking costumes. The film as a whole has a Technicolor brightness to it; sometimes this makes it look dated, but often it makes the colours look fabulous – as with the glittering scarlet globe in the background of Big Spender at 13:45, or the differently coloured dresses worn by Charity, Nicky and Helene in There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This at 60:00. I found no colour artefacts.

   There were no real MPEG artefacts, although aliasing is often a problem, as on the lights at 11:42, the cigarette and eye makeup at 15:33 and 16:13, and the steps at 119:34. Telecine wobble affects the opening credits, and all the shots where freeze frames, montages, or burned-on titles are used. Those titles also cause the shots they appear in to become extremely grainy and muddy, thanks to what must have been an especially crude and dated optical titling technology. The overture and intermission stills of Charity look particularly horrid. Most of the film is pretty grainy anyway, though, and there’s a lot of specks, flecks and lines in the image.

   The subtitles are in an oddly blocky font; they’re perfectly readable, but they look weird. Dalek subtitles! Maybe. Anyway, the bad thing about them is that they over-condense the dialogue, and are VERY INACCURATE for the songs. How hard could it be to simply type up the lyrics? Instead, we get ruined rhymes and lost lines. Phooey!

   This is an RSDL disc, with a layer change at 80:06, during the intermission.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

   There are five audio tracks: English and Spanish tracks in Dolby Digital 2.0 at 192 Kbps, and French, German and Italian tracks in Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448 Kbps. I listened to the English track.

   Not remixing the English track to 5.1 is acceptable – such remixes are often almost worthless anyway. What is not acceptable is the lamentable dialogue quality that afflicts so much of the movie. Some songs, such as the opening number, sound terribly studio-bound; but the bigger problem is that when people are not singing, they sound hollow, boomy and muffled, as at 9:50, 18:00, 102:00, and 111:45. I don’t know how much is due to poor decisions in the making of the original soundtrack, but the result is that a lot of the talking here sounds shoddy.

   A lot of dialogue is looped, and of course all the numbers are lipsynched to playback. Most of the time this is carried off pretty well, but sometimes the sync is poor or absent, as at 124:50.

   The music by Cy Coleman is excellent, full of swagger and heart, even if it is so much of its time as often to sound like it belongs in Austin Powers. It could have sounded a bit more vigorous in this transfer, but I didn’t think it was too bad.

   The surrounds are not called upon in this 2.0 transfer.

   And except for any redirected bass your system might send, neither is the subwoofer in demand.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

   A set of small but high-quality extras add genuine value to this disc.

Menu

Featurette: From Stage To Screen (9:02)

Alternate “Happy Ending” (6:44)

Featurette: Costume Design With Edith Head – The Art of Exaggeration (7:31)

Theatrical Trailer (1:35)

   The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• Remastered Dolby Digital 4.0 soundtrack

• Nothing

   The video quality and feature list are identical between the versions, but the slightly higher audio quality swings it for Region 1.

   The video quality is acceptable for a film of this age.

   The audio quality is regrettably compromised.

   The extras are short but sweet.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall