May 20 movie: Sweet Charity. I didn't know it in advance, but it turns out this movie is based on Nights of Cabiria. Sanitized a bit of course: Charity isn't a prostitute like Cabiria, she's a "dance hall girl." Which is a Hollywood euphamism for prostitute (just like in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly was also a prostitute in the original and a dance hall girl in the movie). And I must say, I like Shirley MacLaine but she's no Giulietta Masina. The plot is basically the same although they mess around with a few things. For instance Sweet Charity begins with the ending of Cabiria: the heroine having her life savings stolen by the man she thinks is the love of her life. Except in Cabiria the guy threatened to push her off a cliff but eventually just ran off with the money. In Sweet Charity he pushes her off a bridge in Central Park, with no resulting injuries.
Still, Sweet Charity, like Nights of Cabiria, ends with the heroine giving up everything for love and then being dumped, left with nothing, but still not giving up hope. Except that, being Hollywood, they had to beat us over the head with it. You could see that Cabiria's spirit was unbroken just by the look in her eyes. Charity needed a title card that read "And she lived hopefully ever after" to get the message across. I heard that after poor audience response, they rereleased it with an alternate ending where Charity's boyfriend thinks better of it and takes her back. Ye gods! Remaking Nights of Cabiria as a musical was bad enough, but giving it a happy ending is a crime.
I recorded this for 2 reasons: Ricardo Montalban and Sammy Davis. Either one of them makes a movie worth watching, but both? Wowie wow wow! Too bad both parts are small, and they don't share any scenes. Montalban plays the Italian movie star who picks up Charity after his girlfriend walks out, then Charity ends up hiding all night in the closet when the girlfriend comes back. Davis played the preacher of a hippie church, a character with no equivalent in Nights of Cabiria. Well, maybe the hypnotist. Anyway Davis has to talk this idiotic "hep cat" dialogue, but he does get a fabulous dance number with his hippie flock.
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