Bob Fosse's Extraordinary Directorial Career Began and Ended Big with Sweet Charity and Star 80

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Bob Fosse’s legacy would be formidable even if he’d never even contemplated directing a movie. It was as a demanding, innovative and unrelenting dancer and choreographer that Fosse first made his name, before segueing into directing theater.

Fosse choreographed and directed Sweet Charity on Broadway. When the musical was adapted for film, he remained in the director’s chair. Fosse’s cinematic 1969 directorial debut boasts a pedigree both impressive and unlikely. The film is an adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name, with a book by Neil Simon and music and lyrics by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields respectively. Sweet Charity in turn is a remake of Federico Feillini’s Nights of Cabiria with a script by Peter Stone (Charade, The Taking of the Pelham 123).

This meant that Fosse had an opportunity to put his stamp on material shaped and molded by figures as dissimilar as Neil Simon and Federico Fellini. Sweet Charity arrived at a curious time for American film. Big-budget, elephantine musicals were on their way out. They were seen as bloated, backwards anachronisms, relics of a dying studio system. They were prog rock to New Hollywood’s punk.

With Sweet Charity, Old Hollywood met New Hollywood. This was, like so many Hollywood mega-productions, a big-budget adaptation of a splashy hit Broadway musical, complete with an overture, intermission and one hundred and forty nine minute running time. But Sweet Charity is also deeply plugged into the riotous countercultural energy of the time and cinematic revolutions exploding across the globe. To paraphrase the title of one of the musical’s standout songs (crooned by Sammy Davis Jr. as a groovy, swinging way out cult leader, ideal casting), Fosse and his collaborators give what could have been just another bloated musical in another filmmaker’s hands the rhythm of life.

A perfectly cast Shirley MacLaine stars in the title role of Charity Hope Valentine, a gum-smacking New York single gal with a big, big heart, fuzzy head and mixed-up vocabulary who has wasted the best years of her youth working as a taxi dancer at a rundown establishment. Charity has her heart broken over and over again. Yet she does not give into hopelessness or despair, even when she probably should. After all, her middle name is literally Hope.

After an endless series of bad relationships with deplorable men, Charity meets cute with Oscar (John McMartin), a milquetoast actuary with a buttoned-up soul who sees the the goodness and sweetness in Charity and wants very much to ignore everything else, particularly her profession, past and the dude whose name she has tattooed on her arm. He wants to forgive and forget, but his uptight, repressed brain makes that impossible.

McMartin, who won a Tony for the role onstage, lends a Jack Lemmon quality to Charity’s adorably dorky but overwhelmed suitor. Oscar is a kook and an oddball in his own right who loves Charity but is doomed by his tragic inability to overlook her past for his future’s sake.

In Fosse’s nimble hands, everything here becomes a dance. Everything becomes rhythm. Everything becomes music. The dancer turned director seems as exhilarated and empowered by the possibilities of editing, cinematography and production design as he is by the infinite possibilities of choreographed motion.

In its first act in particular Fosse seems intent on using just every stylistic flourish from the era. Zoom ins! Zoom outs! Freeze frames! Photo montages! Crazy filters that lend a psychedelic quality to already groovy scenes! Backwards motion! It’s Fosse’s happening and it freaks him out!

It’s as if Fosse was worried that he wouldn’t have an opportunity to make another movie so he decided to cram everything he ever wanted to do as a filmmaker into one crazily over-stuffed extravaganza.

A lot of choreographers who make the big leap to film seem concerned primarily, if not exclusively, with preserving the integrity of the dancing. Not Fosse. He wasn’t a choreographer making a film: he was a natural-born filmmaker who also happened to be a brilliant choreographer.

Obviously, dancing is of supreme importance here. There’s an intentionally mechanical quality to many of the early production numbers, almost as if the cynical dancers who unhappily share a workplace and a similar set of heartaches with Charity are sex robots offering a simulacrum of human sexuality and companionship at its coldest rather the real thing.

Just as the music of James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic has been recycled and reused in countless hip hop songs, Sweet Charity’s many iconic dance numbers have been more or less stolen for similarly iconic videos from Paula Abdul (herself a choreographer), En Vogue and Beyonce and many others. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that Fosse invented the music video here but his musical, almost percussive use of editing and the dazzling juxtaposition of sound and image certainly helped lay the groundwork for what MTV would become.

Charity’s co-workers at the dance hall hide their vulnerability and humanity but Charity embodies squirmy vulnerability and tragicomic humanity. She’s a good girl with a bad past who maintains an almost child-like innocence despite the seedy nature of her life and work. She’s spent decades trawling through sewers looking for love and acceptance yet somehow has managed to hold onto a fundamental innocence.

The coldness and incongruous aggression of the dancing serves a thematic purpose as well. With the exception of Charity, these women have hardened themselves to the cruelty of the world as a protective measure. For them, “romance” is largely transactional, an exchange of youth and beauty in exchange for money, status and respectability. Charity has been working in this particular pit of sadness for eight years and has somehow held onto her belief in love, and humanity’s fundamental goodness, in spite of everything she’s seen and endured.

Sweet Charity is fundamentally concerned with the strength and will of romantics like Charity, who keep on believing in love and destiny no matter how many times their hearts are broken, and the weakness of men like Oscar, who wants desperately to love unconditionally, but is too imprisoned by his hang-ups and insecurities to do so.

Late in Sweet Charity, our crestfallen heroine is wandering through the city when she’s consoled by a group of hippies that include a very young Bud Cort. As baby-faced suicide fanatic Harold of Harold and Maude fame, Cort would soon become one of those weirdly wonderful faces that defined New Hollywood. The symbolism of the moment is powerful: it’s as if these guitar-strumming, peace-loving hippies are beckoning our plucky heroine to join them in a more loving and kind new era unencumbered by the conformity and judgment of the straight world and our corny Eisenhower-era past. Cort’s saucer-eyed angel face looms as a harbinger of a new era, for Hollywood and for American culture, where a maverick like Fosse would be empowered to do his best, most challenging and least compromised work.

Sweet Charity does what musicals are supposed to do: leave audiences with a song on the tip of their tongue (in this case, probably “Big Spender”, “The Rhythm of Life” or “If My Friends Could See Me Now”) and a whole lot of heartbreak.

Fosse’s career as a dancer and choreographer was long. His career as a filmmaker was much shorter. It lasted only the fourteen years separating 1969’s Sweet Charity and 1983’s Star 80 and resulted in a mere five films. What Fosse’s film career lacked in quantity, it made up for in quality.

Fosse ended his film career with another story about a beautiful, trusting young woman who falls in love with the wrong men and ends up paying a terrible price for it. In Star 80 that innocent is Playboy Playmate turned actress Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway), a naive small town girl from Canada who meets the ultimate wrong man in Paul Snider (Eric Roberts).

Snider is a sometimes pimp who emits an overpowering stench of failure and desperation so massive it can be detected from other planets. He’s a small-time hustler with big dreams and a pathetic, poignant longing to prove himself an equal to the people who matter, the artists and musicians and businessmen and celebrities who can give him access to a moneyed world beyond his feverish, money, status and power-obsessed imagination.

Snider discovers a gorgeous, palatable vehicle for his ruthless ambition when he spies Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway), a gorgeous teenager working at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver. Snider sees star quality in Stratten. She’s not just another beautiful teenager girl; she has that ineffable charisma that separates run of the mill beauties, your prom queens and whatnot, from international sex symbols. That unquantifiable something, far beyond mere beauty (God knows the Playboy mansion has always been filled with great beauties, very few of whom went on to accomplish what Stratten did) briefly rocketed Stratten to stardom even as it caused a rift in her relationship with Snider that ended with him brutally murdering her with a shotgun, then sexually abusing the corpse before turning the gun on himself.

Star 80 takes the form of a docudrama, complete with documentary-style talking head commentary from people who knew Snider and Stratten during their brief but explosive relationship. Images of Snider covered in blood, delivering an epic, endless monologue in which he rages against the powerful men he holds responsible for his marriage’s demise appear very early in the film, and reappear throughout.

There’s consequently no sense of suspense, since we know exactly what’s going to happen, but foregrounding Snider’s awful crime at the film’s beginning lends an awful, claustrophobic sense of foreboding. Snider’s terrible endgame lends a sinister, ominous quality to even the most seemingly mundane events.

Snider sees himself as the embodiment of the Playboy lifestyle but when he meets Hefner and embarrasses himself by reverently quoting the Playboy mogul’s words back to him as if they were Gospel, hero worship almost instantly turns into hatred and rage. He’s intent on punishing others for his own failure and ugliness.

Cliff Robertson appropriately underplays Hefner as a paternal pragmatist who sizes up Snider immediately as a loser and a bad influence yet, despite his extraordinary power, cannot overcome the sense of loyalty Stratten feels towards a man who helped make her a star, then was fatally unable to deal with the ramifications of that stardom.

Snider and Hefner are a study in contrasts. Snider burns white hot. He’s all sweaty emotion and raw ambition whereas Hefner is guile and calm personified, a cool customer whose business, as well as pleasure, involves monetizing the beauty, youth and sexuality of women like Stratten.

Though the genres and tones are wildly different, Star 80 and Sweet Charity have a surprising amount in common thematically. Both films are about gorgeous, naive women who somehow manage to retain an air of innocence despite the sordid nature of their work who become involved with men who cannot handle their sexuality, either in the present tense (Star 80) or the past (Sweet Charity).

The more successful Stratten becomes, the less control Snider has over her life. This is particularly true when Stratten attracts the eye and the libido of an accomplished filmmaker modeled on Peter Bogdanovich, who romanced Dorothy Stratten and later married her younger sister.

Where Sweet Charity found pathos, romance and tragicomedy in a gold-hearted taxi dancer’s doomed quest for love, Star 80 is a brutal psychodrama that grows in intensity until it’s almost unbearably grim.

Roberts makes Snider the personification of toxic masculinity. He’s all ego, arrogance and runaway narcissism, a man who seethes with rage over the idea that his wife might be sleeping with someone else but who has no problem sleeping around himself.

In the very last line of the film, a broken and deranged Snider, whose awful crimes don’t stop with the brutal murder of his wife, vows, “You won’t forget Paul Snider.” That’s undeniably true of Snider as a film character as well.

Roberts is almost too good in Star 80. He’s so convincing as a psychotic lunatic that it’s hard to buy him as anything else, except, possibly, the voice of the title character in A Talking Cat!?! I suspect the primary reason he was not nominated for an Oscar was because the Academy was concerned that, like his character here, Roberts would show up drunk and deranged with a shotgun and start killing people. That’s how convincing he is here.

Star 80 ended Fosse’s directorial career on a ruthlessly unsentimental and punishingly intense note. Star 80 is the antithesis of a crowd-pleaser. It’s more of an automatic, sure-fire bummer but it nevertheless proved, like the Lenny Bruce biopic Lenny before it, that Fosse was a masterful filmmaker even when his films explored a complicated psychological dance of attraction and repulsion as opposed to dance in a more traditional sense.

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