Many movie-goers and reviewers find remakes of hit films automatically unworthy, assuming the decision to remake was merely a case of cashing in on past successes. Especially in the current film industry, in which franchises, sequels, film versions of hit TV shows, and remakes rule, the mature audience’s tolerance for remakes must be at an all-time low. But, remaking or reworking old material has always been a part of Hollywood’s strategy to lure viewers to the box office, and a new version of an old film doesn’t necessarily mean it is without merit or interest. I recently watched all three versions of Chicago, which have their origins in a 1926 play, and while each movie uses the same plot, they all have different themes and subtexts.

 I confess that I am drawn to these movies because the basic plotline for all three involves the rough-and-tumble history of my adopted hometown, Chicago. The tale of Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly is based on the real-life escapades of two 1920s flappers. The tragic circumstances of working girl Beulah Annan provided the background for the Roxie Hart character, while the case of Belva Gaertner was the inspiration for Velma Kelly.  The two girls, especially Belva, were living hard and fast in the free-wheeling Chicago of the Jazz Age, when in 1924, within a month of each other, both women murdered their lovers.

 A cashier in a laundry, Beulah was married to mechanic Albert Annan but was carrying on a flirtation with coworker Harry Kolstedt, who sealed his fate one afternoon in April 1924 when he lured Beulah with the invitation, “Let’s drink wine and spend the afternoon together.” During a lovers’ quarrel, Beulah shot Harry in the back. Unsure of what to do next, she cranked up the record player and listened to “Hula Lou” for three hours before calling her husband for help. Apparently, hubby called the police who hauled Beulah away. Over the next few days, Beulah changed her story many times before deciding on a version in which she shot Kolstedt to protect herself and her honor. During the trial, which according to the Chicago Tribune, may have been the first to allow newsreel cameras in the courtroom, Beulah revealed that she was pregnant, which cinched her acquittal in May 1924. Two days later, she left her husband who had stood by her during the trial.

BEULAH ANNAN WAS DUBBED "THE PRETTIEST MURDERER IN COOK COUNTY" BY NEWSPAPERS.

 Belva, who was much closer to the wild and woolly characters in the movies, had been a singer in one of the cabarets that sprang up in Chicago during World War I. She quickly landed millionaire William Gaertner , and the two were married in 1917.  By 1920, Belva was cheating, and Gaertner threatened divorce. The millionaire hired off-duty police detectives to watch Belva to make sure she did not carry off any of the furniture in the house, which apparently worried him more than her cheating. Belva fought back by hiring her own detectives to watch Gaertner’s team to make sure they didn’t falsify their reports about her daily activities. Belva and Gaertner divorced, and the wayward flapper continued to live fast and loose. On March 12, 1934, she spent the afternoon with her lover, a married car salesman named Walter Law. The two had lunch at the Gingham Café in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and then began drinking a quart of gin as they drove around the area in Belva’s Nash roadster. They ended up in front of Belva’s apartment building on South Forrestville Avenue where the two quarreled, reportedly over Walter’s decision to end the relationship. Police found him slumped over dead in Belva’s car. During the trial, Belva claimed she didn’t remember the events of the day, wistfully noting in her testimony, “We got drunk and he got killed with my gun in my car. But gin and guns — either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don’t they.” Belva must have been convincing, because despite the fact that her lawyer offered no opening remarks, no witnesses, and no closing statement, the teary-eyed jazz baby was acquitted.

BELVA GAERTNER: "GIN AND GUNS, A DICKENS OF A MESS"

During the spring of 1924, there were seven cases involving women who had shot their lovers and/or husbands, but Belva and Beulah are remembered because news reporter Maurine Watkins made them local celebrities in the series of articles she penned about them. Watkins wrote in a “sob sister” style, which means that her sensationalized writing rendered Beulah and Belva as heroines in their own melodramas. Prior to interviewing Gaertner, Watkins was relegated to combing the police blotter for news to cover, but her career perked up when her articles about Belva and Beulah landed on the front page. The headline for Belva’s first story blared “No Sweetheart Worth Killing — Mrs. Gaertner,” while “Woman Plays Jazz as Victim Dies” marked Beulah’s first article. Watkins ended their coverage on a high note, with the acquittals of both –  Beulah in May and Belva in June.

 However, Watkins wasn’t around to follow up on what happened to the two women after their celebrity quickly faded. Two years later, a remarried Belva was still frequenting the hundreds of night clubs and gin joints that defined Chicago during the 1920s. Her new husband decided to divorce her, because he claimed she had “murderous tendencies.” Near the end of 1926, her name appeared in the paper one more time after her arrest for drunken driving. Then she faded into obscurity. Beulah remarried in 1927, quickly divorced, and then died of tuberculosis in 1928. In 1934, Beulah’s first ex, Albert, shot and killed his common law wife.

 Shortly after the two women’s acquittals, Watkins left her Tribune job to study playwriting with George Pierce Baker at Yale University. She turned her notes and articles on the real-life Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner into the stories of Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly in a play titled Chicago, which ran successfully in Chicago and on Broadway in 1926 – 1927. Watkins, who likely contributed to the acquittals of Beulah and Belva with the melodramatic tone of her news articles, shaped their tales into an indictment of the tabloid press and a cautionary tale for women in her play. The following year, Cecil B. DeMille turned it into a successful silent film for his company, DeMille Pictures Corporation.  Another version of the story was released in 1942 as Roxie Hart, which was more of a vehicle for Ginger Rogers than a faithful adaptation of the play. In the 1970s, Bob Fosse got the rights to the play for his Broadway musical, Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville, which was revived in the mid-1990s as Chicago: The Musical. This interpretation of the play was turned into the Oscar-winning 2002 movie musical Chicago.

PHYLLIS HAVER AS ROXIE HART, WITH VICTOR VARCONI AS AMOS

 All three movies follow the same basic plotline: Mrs. Roxie Hart kills a man named Casely  who was alone with her in her apartment. Her soft-hearted husband Amos procures the services of the best defense lawyer in Chicago, Billy Flynn, to defend Roxie, who is in Cook County jail. In jail, she becomes the darling of the press, while Flynn works hard to change her image from jazz-age  baby to sweet, young thing. His tricks work, and Roxie is acquitted by an all-male jury whose members are not immune to her charms. Despite following the same basic plotline, the three films differ a great deal, because they were produced during different eras. It is more fruitful to consider each film as a product of its time than to compare and contrast it to the original source material.  

The 1927 silent version focuses almost entirely on Roxie Hart, who is played by Phyllis Haver.  Haver — an excellent silent-film actress — makes the best Roxie, who is a selfish, greedy, and conniving character yet somehow still likable. A former Mack Sennett bathing beauty, Haver knew how to use her physicality to its best advantage.  When Roxie’s lover (spelled Casley in this version of the film) announces he is leaving her, he ends up knocking her around. Haver tumbles, falls, and stumbles backwards into a startling position that makes her look at first like a victim and then like a predator as she grabs a gun and shoots the unarmed man. (See photo at top of post.) Later in jail, she starts an argument with Velma Kelly over who has received the most press coverage. Strangely enough, Velma is shown using an old-fashioned fat-reducing machine — the kind with the leather band that you put around your waist as the machine jiggles the fat from your body — and the two start to brawl while Velma is still jiggling in the machine. A mass of legs and arms tumble into frame as the two women engage in the funniest catfight I have ever seen onscreen. Later, when Billy Flynn instructs Roxie on the proper facial expressions during the trial, Haver’s talent is apparent as she mugs in close up for the camera.

 Though Frank Urson is credited as director, most sources acknowledge that DeMille had creative control on Chicago. The production team consisted of DeMille’s favorite collaborators, including cinematographer J. Peverell Marley, art director Mitchell Leisen (later a director himself), editor Anne Bauchens, and costumer Adrian. The tight linear narrative and the perfect pacing are hallmarks of DeMille’s style, while the use of props as simple symbols — a clown statue rests on the mantle near Amos, for example — is an oft-seen device in the director’s movies.  DeMille was famous in his silent films for showing sin and skin while preaching morality by having his sinners pay for their crimes and vices in the final reel. His version of Chicago fits into that pattern. The film opens with an intertitle explaining that Chicago is a “story of a little girl gone wrong,” announcing its intent as a cautionary tale for young flappers, but for the first third of the film, the “little girl” wears a thin, flimsy nightgown that displays her cleavage or the outline of her breasts. Roxie is acquitted, as in the original play, but DeMille sees to it that she is still punished at the end. A new murderess steals the coveted spotlight from her as soon as she is acquitted, and then her husband Amos wises up and throws her out into the rainy cold night. The last scene shows her standing in the street looking forlorn as people scurry by her, oblivious to her identity.  The rain washes an old newspaper announcing Roxie’s acquittal down the street. The camera tracks with it as it flows into the gutter and down the drain. Roxie’s lifestyle of jazz and parties at the expense of her marriage and her virtue had landed her out in the cold. She disappears into the rain  – alone and anonymous.

 The year 1927 was the height of the flapper on film, though the character had appeared in magazines and novels since the early 1920s. Being a flapper was about more than just fashion, though that was part of it. A flapper smoked, drank, club-hopped, worked, and acted in ways that were the complete opposite of women in previous generations. Newspapers and magazines were full of articles debating the effect of flappers on our society; some denounced them; others defended them. Like the play, the film version of Chicago still criticized the press for turning news into entertainment and manipulating public opinion, but DeMille also shaped Roxie’s story into a fable about the foibles of flapperhood.

 Fifteen years later, when the country and the film industry were long past an obsession with flappers, another version of Chicago was released titled Roxie Hart. Directed by William Wellman, the script altered details of the story to fit the norms of the industry during the Golden Age, particularly the Production Code and the star system. The character of Roxie was shaped to fit Ginger Rogers’s star image. For example, though Roxie Hart is not a musical, Rogers gets an opportunity to show off her marvelous dancing skills in two scenes: She dances the “black hula,” which mesmerizes a young reporter who falls in love with her and performs a tap dance up and down a set of steps that rivals Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s famous turn in The Littlest Rebel. Unlike the calculating protagonist of the silent version, Rogers’ dim, gum-chewing Roxie is fun-loving, naïve, and vivacious, which helps to showcase the actress’s comic abilities.

GINGER ROGERS AS ROXIE HART

 The Production Code had a problem with main characters who were murderers, so in this version, Roxie is not really the killer. She is talked into taking the rap for her husband Amos, because no woman has ever been convicted of murder in Cook County, Illinois. Amos killed Fred Casely while defending the sanctity of his home. Casely, a talent agent, had promised Roxie he would help her get into show biz, and she believed him. But, Amos caught Casely chasing after Roxie, though the nasty particulars are left vague, and the murder occurs behind closed doors. The Code also had a problem with showing the institutions of our society in a bad light. So, the original play’s condemnation of the press and the justice system were softened or eliminated. This version uses a flashback structure to set the main story — Roxie’s arrest and trial — in the past during the wild old days of the Roaring 20s, making it clear that corruption was part of the past. The press’s  tendency to turn news into entertainment and to shape public opinion is replaced by a traditional love story, with the main reporter falling in love with Roxie. As in the original Chicago, Billy Flynn instructs Roxie on how to behave for the jury so that she can sway them with a combination of her “innocent” demeanor and her great-looking legs. But, to ensure the audience that our justice system does indeed work as it should, Amos is shown admitting his guilt. He is then arrested. Finally, it is made clear that Amos divorces Roxie while she is in jail, so when Roxie and the reporter fall in love, she is not committing adultery. 

Broadway musical star Gwen Verdon saw Roxie Hart and wanted her husband Bob Fosse to buy the property and turn it into a musical. Maurine Watkins had become a born-again Christian in her senior years and did not want to let go of the rights to her risqué play. Finally, when she died, her estate sold the rights to Fosse, who turned it into the Chicago: A Musical Vaudeville during the mid-1970s — the height of the Watergate era. The plays condemnation of corrupted social institutions suited the times once again. Fosse also sharpened the themes regarding the role the press plays in shaping public opinion and our culture’s ever-growing fascination with celebrity. Fosse’s musical was eclipsed by the more sentimental A Chorus Line during the 1970s, but when it was revived on Broadway as Chicago: The Musical in the 1990s, the themes fit our celebrity-obsessed culture perfectly, and the play became a major hit.

CATHERINE ZETA JONES AS VELMA KELLY & RENEE ZELLWEGER AS ROXIE HART

 In addition to these themes, the movie version of Chicago included another of Fosse’s alterations to the original material, which was the expansion of the role of Velma Kelly, played by Catherine Zeta Jones. The character Velma Kelly appears in only one scene in the silent version of Chicago and doesn’t appear in Roxie Hart at all, though there is a Velma Wall in a very, very tiny role. The expansion of the role of Velma and an increased focus on the other women in jail adds meaning to the material. While the critical commentary on celebrity and the press remain the obvious themes of the film, the attention given to the jailed women’s stories offers a hard-edged criticism of romantic relationships, particularly from the woman’s point of view. This idea is reinforced by director Rob Marshall’s interpretation of the musical numbers for the film. Most of them are presented as the internal fantasies of Roxie, played by Renee Zellweger, or at least from her female perspective. In other words, this version of Chicago offers a feminist, or at least a feminine, criticism of marriage or relationships; according to this movie, they certainly aren’t the romantic fairy tales they are cracked up to be. Aside from Roxie and Velma’s disillusionment with marriage, the “Cellblock Tango” production number, in which several women reveal the stories behind their crimes, offers a variety of reasons why men drive women to murder, including infidelity, indifference, and insensitivity.

Musicals are generally romantic fantasies in which the boy courts the girl and wins her affections for the ultimate happy ending. In Chicago, Velma and Roxie, who are both single at the end of the film, end up happy and successful by combining their talents together in a vaudeville act — they are clearly better off without men. This twist to the conventional ending of the musical comedy serves as a further dig at marriage and relationships. 

I liked all three versions of Chicago for different reasons. Comparing and contrasting them reminded me that films reflect the era in which they were produced even when based on the same source material.