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 Chicago
(2002).
Rob Marshall, director.
Widescreen anamorphic (1.85:1), Color, Dolby Digital and DTS
5.1. Interviews, extras. 2-disc. Miramax.
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DVD |
 hicago
is (at least) the fifth film or play to be based on two celebrated
real-life murders that took place in the City of Big Shoulders
during the Roaring Twenties. In the first case, a jazz singer
named Belva Gaertner shot and killed her young lover Walter
Law, then claimed she’d passed out and couldn’t
remember what happened. (“Gin and guns… together
they get you into a dickens of a mess, don’t they?”
said she.) In the  second,
“Beautiful” Beulah Annan shot and killed her lover
Harry Kalstedt, watched him die for two hours while listening
to fox trot records on a phonograph, then told her husband,
Albert, that Kalstedt had tried to rape her. She later admitted
to murdering Kalstedt for threatening to leave her, probably
after she told him—falsely—that she was pregnant.
(As in the film, Beulah and her lawyer also played the “pregnancy”
card during the trial!)
In 1926, Maurine Watkins—the
Radcliffe-schooled reporter who’d covered both trials
for the Chicago Tribune (and cooked up the sob sister
angle that helped get both women off)—loosely fictionalized
the two murderesses in her satiric play Chicago, turning
Belva into jazz baby Velma Kelly, Beulah into wannabe jazz baby
Roxie Hart, and their two lawyers into silver-tongued Billy
Flynn. Chicago was made into a silent film of the same
name in 1927, and a talkie, the still hilarious Roxie Hart,
in 1942. In 1975, director/choreographer Bob Fosse rediscovered
Watkins’ Chicago and made it into “a musical
vaudeville,” with songs by the team of Kander and Ebb
(Cabaret, The Act, etc.). This, in turn, became
the basis for Tony/Emmy/Peabody/ Director’s Guild Award-winning
director/choreographer Rob Marshall’s Chicago,
last year’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture.
Though Chicago
wasn’t the best movie of 2002, it is terrifically entertaining,
not so much for its cynical storyline and wised-up cast of twenties
stereotypes—all of whom, after eighty years, are growing
a little long in the tooth—and not even for its music,
which, like most Kander and Ebb scores, is very much a lightweight
affair, but for director Marshall’s imaginative staging
of Bob Fosse’s choreography and the star turns of its
principal performers. Fosse’s dance numbers lend themselves
to cinema and are, in fact, rather cinematic, consisting, as
they do, of a series of short posed “takes.” Marshall
understands this, as Fosse himself certainly did, and following
Fosse’s own lead in films like Cabaret and All
That Jazz interlaces the staged number with live action
sequences—either as ironic counterpoints or wishful and/or
cynical fantasies. Though Marshall’s crosscutting can
be distracting to those who simply want to watch a performer
perform (and doesn’t keep the overlong Chicago
from dragging just a bit), it does manage to de-emphasize the
staginess of this play-based film, while at the same time also
adding a deft bit of theatricality to a story that
is, after all, wholly about show business “razzle-dazzle.”
For all the buzz about how
Marshall’s Chicago and Baz Luhrman’s Moulin
Rouge signal a rethinking of the movie musical, it doesn’t
seem to me that either one is much different (or better) than
Fosse’s own films of the ’70s, which pioneered these
same techniques. What’s really changed here isn’t
the style but the casting—and, I think, the audience’s
surprised appreciation of the results. I, for one, would never
have guessed that Renée Zellweger as Roxie (sounding
and looking a good bit like an anorectic Marilyn—and,
my God, what a great Roxie Hart she would have been),
Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma, and Richard Gere as Billy could
have pulled off these song-and-dance numbers with such charm
and aplomb. But so they do—and all of them in their own
voices and on their own two feet. While Zeta-Jones was apparently
the only one of the trio with considerable stage experience
in musicals, the other two turn out to be better-than-passable
singers and dancers—though the show-stopper, “The
Cell Block Tango,” doesn’t belong to either of them
but to Zeta-Jones and the chorus.
And speaking of showstoppers,
this is one helluva transfer, as befits an Academy Award winner.
It will certainly make my Best DVD list at year’s end—and
not just for its spectacular visuals, which, by the way, will
prove a real test for your set’s black-level retention
and ability to hold texture in whites because of the abundant
use of theatrical spots against dead-black backgrounds and other
pyrotechnic high-key lighting schemes. Sonically, this disc
is as good as anything I’ve heard on DVD. The surround
mix here is just marvelous, with sounds and music distributed
through a true 270-degree arc and not just pinned to front and
side channels. The quality of reproduction is also superb—one
of the few DVDs that is actually musical in a hi-fi sense. All
in all, a sweet irresistible treat. 
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