Faces of Mt. MacLaine

Orson Welles said it best. Confronted by Hollywood's movie-making paraphernalia, he chortled: "This is the biggest electric train any boy ever had to play with." Broadway Choreographer-Director Bob Fosse obviously felt the same exhilaration. But all he could do with that expensive equipment was play around. The result is a chuffing, tooting, O-gauge musical, Sweet Charity.

Charity began in 1957 as the title character of Nights of Cabiria, an Italian sleeper about a Punchinello prostitute. The director-writer was Federico Fellini; the star was his wife, Giulietta Masina. Maintaining the tradition, Fosse turned the film into a Broadway musical starring his wife, Gwen Verdon, as a heart-of-gold "hostess" named Charity Hope Valentine.

In its newest version, Verdon has been replaced by a carrot-topped Shirley MacLaine, whose wide-screen pathos and galvanic energy does not quite match her predecessors'. Most of the other essentials remain the same. Sleazy customers steal in on little cad feet; for $6.50 an hour Charity hustles them around the dancehall floor--and sometimes into bed. A born romantic--hence the heart tattooed on her arm--Charity continually falls for Mr. Wrong. A leeching gigolo gloms her purse; a narcissistic movie star (Ricardo Montalban) invites her up to his apartment and forces her to be a voyeuse while he makes love to his mistress. A neurotic actuary (John McMartin) asks her to marry him--then turns out to be a zero.

Map Making. The Broadway book had the grace to mock itself. In the end Charity was blessed by a good fairy --who turned out to be a costumed pitch woman plugging a CBS-TV show. Peter Stone's hollow adaptation takes itself seriously. Charity, maundering through Central Park, converses with a bunch of flower children who teach her the power of Love.

In the theater, Fosse's fluid scene shifting seemed cinematic. On film, the process is reversed. Dance numbers are given coy subtitles, crowd scenes seem achingly stagy. Whenever he cannot provide a valid transition, Fosse makes the frame a mammoth still picture of his star --strictly for those interested in the north, south, east and west faces of Mt. MacLaine. Regardless of how attractive the faces are, that is not film making, it is map making.

Fosse the director is sometimes redeemed by Fosse the choreographer. But it is the score however, that remains the show's real strength. Cy Coleman's hip-flip music flows freely from pure ballad (Where Am I Going?) to Bachish parody (Rhythm of Life). Dorothy Fields, 63, won an Oscar for the lyrics of The Way You Look Tonight back in 1936. She may win another for her insistence on writing wittily for the characters instead of warily for the charts.

The idea of a musical about a warbling hooker approaching 40 remains as attractive today as it was in 1966 when it opened on Broadway. They ought to make a movie of it some day.

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