By Scott Ross
A highly stylized adaptation by Nunnally Johnson of the Maureen Watkins play Chicago, which Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb later transmigrated into their musical with John Kander – and which that venerated hack Rob Marshall betrayed with his inexplicably popular movie. (Which violated the very spirit of musicals by its idiotically literal insistence that the numbers be justified. Why do a musical, then?)
Directed with a rather surprisingly arch eye by William Wellman, it is, like the Fosse musical, a full-out attack on celebrity-worship, the law, the press, accepted pieties and the audience itself, which somehow got by the Breen Office censors – presumably because of the softened ending, which one can see coming fairly early on and which is, although “ironic,” a bit of a let-down, especially since the movie itself is so magnificently, sometimes wildly, funny. Ginger Rogers, fresh off her Oscar win (and just prior to her pluperfect three-point turn in Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor) looks spectacular, fully embraces Roxy’s cheapness and vulgarity, and has a great impromptu tap-dance on the jail-house stairs. (Although you can’t quite believe it; if Roxy is that good, why couldn’t she make it in show-biz?)
Alfred Newman’s score incorporates, very wittily, some choice 1920s musical hits, and the great supporting cast includes Adolphe Menjou (as Billy Flynn), Lynne Overman as the chief louse among the reporters, Nigel Bruce, Phil Silvers as a peerlessly annoying press photographer, Sara Allgood (as Matron Morton), William Frawley, Spring Byington (as Mary Sunshine), George Chandler (as a rather rat-like Amos), George Lessey (as the Judge, who manages to get his face into every courtroom photo) and Iris Adrian (as “Two-Gun” Gertie.)
Roxie’s father, informed by telephone that his daughter has been arrested on a charge of murder, to his wife: They’re going to hang Roxie.
Roxie’s mother (Approvingly): What did I tell you?
Text copyright 2015 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 