Chicago (The Original 1927 film Restored)

by Thomas Doherty

Chicago may be the Second City in population, finance, and cosmopolitan sophistication, but in the annals of American crime the metropolitan also-ran leaps into first place. Since the 1920s—because of the 1920s—it has been the locus classicus for gangsterism and its ancillary atmospherics—smart-mouthed dames, cynical newspaperman, corrupt politicos, and spats-wearing, tommy-gun-toting Jewish, Italian, and Irish hoods muscling in on each other’s turf, and women. The image kicking off Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) preserves the mythos in amber: a bullet-riddled casket bleeds contraband hooch into a hearse, capped by the redundant credit line locating us in space in time: “Chicago, 1929.”

Chicago, the film, from 1927, is the real deal: a shimmering Jazz Age window into the Jazz Age. Known mainly through the Broadway musical road show and Rob Marshall’s razzle-dazzle film version in 2002, and somewhat less so from the Breen office-fumigated remake Roxie Hart (1942), the film—lovingly resurrected and restored by the elves at Flicker Alley—fascinates as a self-reflexive self-portrait of an epoch still gyrating to jungle music, rolling in easy money, and burning its candle at both ends, before the Crash and before a very hung-over F. Scott Fitzgerald christened the decade in his elegiac 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”

Fortunately, Chicago is Chicago avant le deluge, fox-trotting to the sassy rhythms of the city’s unofficial poet laureate—not the sentimental boosterism of Carl Sandburg but the seen-it-all cynicism of Chicago Daily News newspaperman turned playwright turned screenwriter Ben Hecht. Hecht had typed too many column inches on the police beat about conniving dolls, pay-for-play journalists, and shyster lawyers to toe the official line on female virtue, media integrity, and American justice. Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, originally staged in 1928, and Hecht’s gangster-film prototypes Underworld (1928) and Scarface (1932) pretty much shaded the town’s rep for the ages. With the possible exception of Al Capone—a city father known to get applause from the fans in Wrigley Field—no one did more to cement Chicago’s notoriety as a Mecca for mobsters, molls, and mendacity.

Hecht might seem almost to have been an unbilled script doctor on Chicago, but the credits name producer Cecil B. DeMille, already a brand name for grandiose historical epics; director Fred Urson, DeMille’s assistant director on The King of Kings; and screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee, working from the original play by Maurine Watkins, herself a Chicago Tribune reporter who went legit at the Yale Drama School. In the snazzy booklet that accompanies the DVD, film critic Robert S. Birchard makes a persuasive case that whoever the director of record, the man holding the megaphone was really DeMille, whose production company bankrolled the film and who nominally served as the “supervising producer.” DeMille’s reverent biblical biopic The King of Kings was also in theaters at the time and he may not have wanted to taint the alabaster temples of Jerusalem with the gin-soaked speakeasies of the Babylon on Lake Michigan. Among other evidence, Birchard cites a 1928 issue of Picture Play magazine that reveals DeMille’s contributions and notes Chicago “seems to be replete with DeMille touches,” among which, of course, is the director’s trademark foot fetishism.

The plot is ur-tabloid, which figures since playwright Watkins ripped the scenario from her front-page coverage of the real-life case of a homicidal flapper named Beulah Anna, who shot her lover and left him bleeding to death while she played the fox trot “Hula Lou” over and over again on the phonograph. (He had it coming). Roxie (a lively Phyllis Haver) is the kind of girl who wears bells on her garters and hands them out like calling cards. When she sort-of-accidentally shoots her lover (Eugene Palette, Hollywood’s favorite ectomorph character actor in the screwball comedies of the 1930s), her doting, doltish husband Amos (Victor Varconi, a real stiff) tries to take the rap for the vixen, but the DA knows the floozy is lying every time her lips, or hips, move. A Hechtian newspaper reporter sizes her up as ready-made media fodder, and he should know. “I’m the lad who’ll play you up as ‘Chicago’s Most Beautiful Murderess’!,” he brags in intertitle. “Tomorrow, they’ll be naming babies after you.” Cue the headline montage (“Roxie Hart: ‘The Jazz Slayer,’” “Roxie Riddles Romeo”) and a tabloid star is born. As the vivacious, amoral, and none too bright Roxie, silent-screen siren Haver—vaguely redolent of Madonna in her “Vogue” period—shows a lot of spunk, but one can’t help but wonder what Louise Brooks—soon off to find screen immortality in the equally decadent Berlin of Weimar Germany—might have done with so plum a part in an American film.

The trial scene is a hoot. To defend his errant wife, Roxie’s patsy hubby goes into hock to hire the city’s top chiseling shyster Billy Flynn (William Edeson), who knows better than to be seduced by the cooing of the jazz baby. “Cut the bull,” he snaps. “I’m your lawyer—not your husband!” Seeing the trial as performance art on the stage of blind justice, Flynn coaches Roxie in the fine points of virtue beset, the better to sway the all-male jury. Roxie crosses her gams; the men tap their feet; Roxie demurely pulls her dress down, the feet go flaccid. (The DeMille touch.) As the courtroom testimony gets down and dirty, the camera cuts away to a trio of salesgirl-flapper types in the gallery, sucking up the salacious details, all wide-eyed and gum-smacking (still a new thing at the time, and presumably Wrigley’s)

Like its heroine, Chicago wallows in the carefree immorality that led bluenoses to rally for the Hollywood Production Code in 1930—ironically, a work conceived and cowritten by the Chicago based trade publisher Martin J. Quigley. A pretty maid who has goo-goo eyes for Roxie’s husband and who lies to the cops to cover up for him, lands her man in the end. Roxie, who literally gets away with murder, is punished after a fashion in the last reel (told off by her long-suffering husband and tossed out into the rain-swept night as her newspaper fame floats into the gutter), but who can doubt that a girl of her resources will land on her feet?

 Roxie Hart (Phyllis Haver) plays her husband (Victor Varconi) for a lug

The Flicker Alley re-presentation of this once-thought-lost film is topnotch. Chicago benefits immensely from the jaunty musical track performed by the Mont Alta Motion Picture Orchestra, an effective “period” re-creation that is faithful to its pop roots without swinging too slavishly down Tin Pan Alley. Drawing on the original cue sheets, conductor Rodney Sauer strove for “an example of a score that could have been heard in a theater when this film was first released.” Though silent film purists will grouse at the addition of sonic effects for aural sweetening (a ringing alarm, the clang of bells, a pistol shot), the postproduction soundtrack is welcome sweetening, with none of the brassy intrusiveness of so many retrospective scores.

Alas, the wraparound material on the two-disk DVD set is only so-so: a brief recap of the case of Beulah Anna, the real Roxie Hart; and, on a separate disc; a 1985 newsreel compilation called The Flapper Story, and, of most interest, a 1950 theatrical release from The March of Time entitled The Golden Twenties.

The frame story for The Golden Twenties—a decadal tag that never took, presumably coined to distinguish it from the Warner Bros. classic The Roaring Twenties (1939)—has a well-scrubbed lad doing a homework assignment at the New York Public Library. In the stacks, he runs into a middle-aged duffer who introduces him to the Jazz Age. In unspooling newsreel footage and color commentary on the bygone era, the documentary partakes of the postwar rehabilitation of the 1920s as a fun-filled frolic viewed through the rosy filter of nostalgia. In the 1930s, the 1920s were a bad memory, the reckless binge that led to the long hang-over of the Great Depression. By the 1950s, time had soothed the headache. From the vantage of the Cold War anxieties, it all looked like quaint, harmless fun, the foggy pieces of a wild undergraduate weekend.

 A reporter stages a photo to turn Roxie into a tabloid star

Nonetheless, the retrospective narrations by men who well remember the events are tempered by the rueful knowledge of what came after. Radio commentator and former head of the Office of War Information Elmer Davies is notably somber, lamenting the naiveté of a generation that thought peace and prosperity was a line on a graph that could only soar onwards and upwards. Impressively too, though the trip down memory lane manages to omit Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and the Harlem Renaissance, the original Red Scare of 1919-1920 and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan are not whitewashed. One wishes, however, that the disc had also included the NBC documentary The Jazz Age (1955), narrated by the inimitable radio humorist and Jazz Age bon vivant Fred Allen, in a nasal twang peppered with the speakeasy slang and syncopated rhythms of the era. The March of Time’s stiff history lesson doesn’t hold a candle to the rush to perdition momentum of The Jazz Age.

A few months before the release of Chicago, the death knell for the silent screen had already sounded with the release of another bouncy period piece, The Jazz Singer. Chicago is a reminder of how advanced silent film language had become by the onset of sound, how little felt was the absence of synchronous dialog. The intertitles are crisp and laconic, the acting agile and naturalistic, and the editing fast and fluid. Kicking things off, the opening, scene-setting intertitle declares: “This is the drama of a Big City—every Big City—and a little girl who was all wrong.” They got the girl dead to rights but not the city—this story is a 100-proof concoction that could only have been brewed in Chicago.—Thomas Doherty

Thomas Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and the author of numerous books.

To purchase Chicago, click here

Copyright © 2010 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.1 2010

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