Sweet Charity

Shirley MacLaine plays Charity Hope Valentine who, despite her job at a seedy dime-a-dance joint, is an incurable optimist. Charity never stops looking for true love and never seems to look for it in the right places. We first see her in the company of Charlie, a slimeball who steals her purse and pushes her into the Central Park pond. Next she stumbles into a one-night stand with Vittorio Vidal, an egotistical movie star; this comes to nothing when Vittorio's contrite girlfriend Ursula comes calling, forcing Charity to spend the night hiding in the closet. Desperate to escape the dance hall, Charity heads to an employment agency, where a bureaucratic clerk informs her that she has no qualifications. Unhappily, Charity heads for the elevator, where she becomes trapped with the very shy – and very claustrophobic – Oscar Lindquist... (Hal Erickson)