[2] It is adapted by Peter Stone from the 1966 stage musical of the same name – also directed and choreographed by Fosse – in turn based on the 1957 Federico Fellini film Nights of Cabiria.

The cast also features John McMartin, Chita Rivera, Paula Kelly, Stubby Kaye, Ricardo Montalbán, Sammy Davis Jr., and Barbara Bouchet.

She longs for love, but has bad luck with men, first seen when her married boyfriend, Charlie, pushes her off Gapstow Bridge in Central Park and steals her life savings of $427.

Looking for a more respectable and rewarding line of work, Charity goes to an employment agency, but she is forced to admit that she has no higher education or qualifications, and the interviewer thinks she has been sent in as a joke.

The two go out together several times, including a visit to an alternative church presided over by a preacher named Big Daddy and "worshiping" with the song "The Rhythm of Life".

Charity returns to the bridge in Central Park where she first appeared in the film and seems ready to throw herself off it, but a passing group of young hippies singing about love and peace hand her a flower, lifting her spirits.

Other dancers include[2] Lorene Yarnell, Lee Roy Reams, Toni Basil, Chelsea Brown, Linda Clifford, Kathryn Doby, Louise Quick, Lance LeGault,[4] and Shelley Graham.

[7] * New song written for the film Shirley MacLaine, a friend of Fosse and his wife and partner Gwen Verdon, had suggested the adaptation to Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal Pictures.

Diamond, who had written the screenplays for The Apartment and Irma la Douce, both starring MacLaine and co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, was originally hired as screenwriter, but he too quit after disagreements with Fosse and was replaced by Peter Stone.

While some praised Fosse's innovative approaches to the staging of some numbers and Shirley MacLaine's performance, others found it overlong, most of the songs ineffective, and the storyline insufficiently engaging.

Vincent Canby in the New York Times was especially harsh, disparaging the film as "so enlarged and so inflated that it has become another maximal movie: a long, noisy and, finally, dim imitation of its source material," and complaining that although MacLaine "often looks like Miss Verdon, she never succeeds in re-creating the eccentric line that gave cohesion to the original".

Additionally, the film's failure marks the first episode of Fosse/Verdon, the 2019 biographical mini-series about Fosse and Gwen Verdon, their rocky marriage, and their long creative partnership.

Sweet Charity, particularly the "Rich Man's Frug" musical number, has served as a visual reference for dance sequences in contemporary popular culture.