Chicago (1927): Ragtime, slapstick, and “yesterday’s news”

The crime
I’ll let the Chicago History Museum’s JoJo Galvan take it from here:

On April 3, 1924, Beulah and her lover had a secret rendezvous in her apartment while her husband was at work. According to Beulah’s later testimony, both she and Kalstedt had been drinking wine when a lovers’ quarrel turned deadly, and she shot him in the back with a gun she kept in her home.

“True Crime in the ’20s: The Beulah Annan Story”

The story
Chicago in its 1927 form both is and isn’t the story you know from the stage musical and the 2002 film. …Well, the story you might know; it’s possible that, like me, you don’t care for musicals and therefore avoided the show in any iteration.

The media progression of Beulah Annan’s murderous tale from headline-dominating tabloid fodder to Oscars-dominating movie is, roughly, that local reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins covered the story for the Trib; Watkins went to Yale Drama School and turned it into a stage play; the play did pretty well, and even toured for a while with an unknown Clark Gable playing Amos Hart, Roxie’s husband; Cecil B. turned it into a silent film, this one, in 1927, which got remade as Roxie Hart in the forties with Ginger Rogers in the lead; and decades later, Watkins teamed up with Kander and Ebb, Belva “Velma” Gaertner’s story got braided in, and you know the rest.

The first filmed version isn’t a musical; doesn’t give Velma Kelly anything to do (she’s in it, technically, but her character doesn’t have a last name yet, and seemingly only exists to give leg-man filmgoers of the time a thrill in the jailhouse scenes); and is currently only available on Tubi, where its soundtrack is the same two piano rags repeated for over an hour and a half. Should you bother with it?

Tough call! There’s a lot to enjoy here! Phyllis Haver’s manipulative and entitled brat of a Roxie really is irresistible, utterly charismatic and cheerfully toxic. Roxie is relatably freaked out after the shooting, then hilariously scheme-y after it, and Haver plays big because the character is; it’s not overdone. Victor Varconi as her beleaguered husband Amos and Robert Edeson as “William” Flynn bring just the right levels of humiliated agita and irritation respectively.

While there’s always that mental adjustment to make to a silent picture, or at least the non-Chaplin/-Keaton ones — recalibrating to the idea that, whatever your generation, it didn’t invent wit, chiaroscuro storytelling, or despairing of/roasting the tabloid press — it’s usually worthwhile to return to previous ages, just to see which cases they considered “major,” and what the art they made about those cases looked like. What’s the pacing like? How is the tone different? Whose story is it?

But not everyone has the patience for the format. Even viewers who do will feel like Chicago is 20 minutes too long; each sequence kind of hangs around for a couple minutes after already having done what it came to. In Chicago‘s case, it is marvelous to see how much they do with relatively few dialogue cards,

the acting is quite good, and the production design and costuming is such a treat (someone source me Flynn’s desk safe!). The film does have to provide a certain amount of exposition/background for audiences who may not have followed the story several years prior to Chicago‘s release and, obviously, couldn’t second-screen information for themselves, so I did grade on that curve. But the points the script wants to make about the fickle attentions of ink-stained wretches, the choice between a magnetic woman and a “good” one, etc. don’t require this long a runtime, or show up quickly enough.

And an hour and a half of the same two songs is reeeeally a trial, if you’ll forgive the pun — and I like ragtime! But it sure as hell didn’t help the minutes fly by.

All of that said: try it. It’s ensorcelling to look at, but you don’t have to pay rigid attention, especially if you’ve seen any other iteration of the story; half-watching or watching half, you’ll get the same enjoyment, and the same larger sense of Prohibition-era ideas about lady killers and tabloid justice.

Chicago (1927)

Recommendation: Watch it…on mute, with 100-ish minutes of instrumental music cued up on Spotify or something

The case in favor:

• A super-watchable and witty performance from Phyllis Haver as Roxie Hart
• Lenore J. Coffee and John Krafft’s dialogue cards are a real time capsule
• The costumes! In the jail sequence alone, m’God

The case against:

• Too long, overall and at times in-scene
• Scott Joplin himself didn’t hear “Pineapple Rag” this many times total in his life

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