Alternative Insight

Chicago--The Film
A film speaks to its audience--about America



Chicago, the film musical, speaks to America in a heart pumping language of cinematic theatre. The mating of cinematic and theatrical techniques elevate the motion picture Chicago to a modern idiom. The performers sing and often talk to the audience rather than to one another.

The voices carry messages: America of 2003 continues the deceptive practices of 1925; public relations and media guide behavior; razzle-dazzle governs actions.

The film Chicago delivers an emotional rush of musical experience and a thoughtful expression of social significance.

Chicago as Cinematic Theatre
The seamless transitions of cinematic and theatrical techniques are remarkable achievements. Film lighting, staging, costuming, acting, props and backgrounds are entirely different from those of the theatre. Yet, the constant shifts between film and theatre in Chicago are hardly noticed. In these shifts the standard motif of Hollywood musicals, where actors sing to one another, is discarded--In Chicago the actors sing to the audience. The songs have subtle social content--lyrics of women's struggles, exploitation, greed, legal manipulation, prison corruption, media shaping of minds, and crime as entertainment. Chicago's story captivates and informs.

Chicago as Story
The screen adaptation of the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago is loosely based on the real life 1924 drama of Beulah Annan, accused of killing her lover, Harry Kalsteadt in an adulterous relationship. Beulah Annam became "wannabe" vaudeville singer Roxie Hart in the 1926 play The Brave Little Woman. Evidently, the 1924 murder captured America--the story became a 1927 silent film and a 1942 Ginger Rogers film before its appearance on Broadway.

Roxie Hart watches her musical stage idol Velma Kelly perform at the gin-soaked Onyx club. The sultry Velma, who always appears together with her sister, is performing solo, and sings All that Jazz,

Where the gin is cold
And the piano is hot
--And all that jazz,

her life of gin and sin in wicked Chicago. The police wait at the rear of the club to take her into custody for the murder of her philandering husband and sister. As Roxie watches Velma in admiration, she imagines herself a night club star. Her imaginary lifetime of song soon turns into a possible lifetime of incarceration due to an ill-fated wrong. The starry-eyed and naive Roxie murders her lover after she realizes he has no intention of assisting her singing career and is only interested in a salacious affair.

In a prison cell block among other murderesses, including her heroine Velma Kelly, Roxie slowly transforms herself from a naive and adulterous wife into a scheming and publicity- hunting superstar. After trying to befriend a contemptuous Velma Kelly, Roxie takes the limelight and leaves Velma brooding in the shadows. The corrupt prison matron, Mama Morton, who takes Roxie into her custody and leads her to the devious criminal lawyer, Billy Flynn, sings of her system,

The system works
The system called reciprocity.
When you're good to mama,
Mama is good to you.

Billy Flynn foreshadows his method for obtaining acquittals for his clients, with his Razzle-Dazzle song,

Give them the old hocus-pocus.
Razzle-dazzle them,
And they'll never catch wise.

Billy demonstrates his complete awareness of the pulse of the American people by using tabloid columnist Mary Sunshine to unwittingly compose sympathetic portrayals of the scheming Roxie. Acting simultaneously as lawyer and press agent, Flynn guides Roxie to acquittal and eventual fame. After Velma is also acquitted by another Flynn eloquent plea to a jury, Roxie joins Velma in a duo act of guns and violent behavior. The audience is captivated by the singing pair and roars its approval.

Chicago as Social Document
The film Chicago has no intention of being a social document on screen. It becomes one. The social commentary is naturally dissolved into the celluloid without the messages being intrusive or bothersome. "In this town, murder's a form of entertainment," someone says of 1925 Chicago. It's a line that's still relevant.

The musical creates the 1925 Chicago and yet that era of crime and corruption, which the media feel obligated to sensationalize, seems just as alive today. Some of the comparisons are obvious: Billy Flynn's defense of Roxie Hart. which gains her acquittal, is reminiscent of Johnny Cochran's sensational defense and acquittal of O.J. Simpson. Criminals becoming celebrities, escaping conviction, and earning fortunes from their infamy are everyday features of present American life.

The twist of having Matron Morton, who is jailer to almost all white women inmates, played by black actress Queen Latifah, the most captivating performer in the show, is a cool statement. The women prisoners, on murderous row, sing the Cell Block Tango, ballads of women's despair, misfortune and subjugation.

He went out alone at night to find himself
He found Irene, Thelma, Ruth, Sonia and Fred.

He came at me
I had a knife
And he ran into it
..Nine times

And the justification fo their homicidal acts:

If you had been there,
You would have seen it,
And if you would have seen it,
You would have done the same.

Billy Flynn and Matron Morton most eloquently express the manipulative and symbiotic relationships that characterize American society. Billy sings,

It's all show business
These trials,
The whole world.
Give them the razzle-dazzle
Razzle-dazzle them.

And Matron Morton sings,

One hand rubs the other
That we know is true.
When you're good to mama,
Mama is good to you.

The power blocs that control America understand those phrases. They razzle- dazzle the American audience and are good to one another. With these techniques, they maintain their control today as they did in the yesteryear of 1925 Chicago. When the American public becomes aware of the corrupting influences and the pernicious nature of the razzle-dazzle and takes appropriate action against these devices, power will be transferred to where it is meant to be: To those who work for the benefit of all the American people.

alternativeinsight
february 16, 2003

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