Review of Chicago, directed by Cecil B. DeMille

There are certain kinds of movies that you never really forget in your life when you watched them. I’m thinking about this notion when writing this blog post because I remember the first time I ended up watching some silent movies.

I attended the best fashion school in the world at the time for my undergraduate degree, and because I felt like I should’ve taken a fashion history course, I signed up for Costume and Fashion in Film, which was a film and fashion history course taught by Raissa Bretana, who I had seen on YouTube before.

In that class, we watched a handful of silent movies and analyzed them for the costumes the characters were wearing. The work we were doing was to see if they were period accurate, and you could tell that even in the 1920s and 1930s, the costume designers were embellishing the details to reflect more modern trends of the period, rather than being historically accurate.

I was thinking about that class when I pressed play on the 1927 version of Chicago. I typically don’t watch these kinds of movies for fun, but Chicago was calling to me for some reason. Plus it was given for free on my library’s Kanopy subscription, so it’s not like there were stakes involved with renting it.

Here’s my review before I start rambling too much!

After her boyfriend leaves her, Roxie Hart decides to kill him in revenge.

Something to note about my review of the film is that I have never seen any of the other versions of Chicago, nor have I mustered up the courage to go see it on Broadway.

I’ve refused to pay money to see this show on Broadway for so many years, even when I’ve been offered some pretty steep discounts. All of this said, I have no other reference to compare this to—even the original play, which I have not read.

So this is a silent movie. For the uninitiated, or those wanting to dabble in silent films, the dialogue is not verbally spoken through audio, and shows up in the title cards between scenes if they want to convey the important parts of the conversations between characters.

Our main character in this movie is Roxie Hart, who’s tried to find a career on the stage and in performance, but has never managed to really get anywhere with her career due to her background affiliations with the mob.

That’s the lore of her background, but despite all of her failures, she falls for a man named Amos. She’s absolutely smitten for her, but their romance is doomed to fail, setting up the core conflicts of this plot.

They do end up married, but when he wants to leave her after their lengthy time together, it causes Roxie to snap. The movie really dwells on the details of the murder, and we can see how it directly unfolds on screen.

She decides to kill him because no one else can have him except her, and she can’t handle the fact he decided to make this decision.

What happens after this enters melodrama territory. Roxie probably didn’t think the extent of what her actions would cause, but because this is a 1920s Hollywood movie, there has to be some high moral ground.

It wouldn’t be a film from the period without some kind of moral message, and Roxie is caught pretty quickly for what she’s done.

After going on trial, she’s found guilty and justice is enacted for the life she took. Although this is a movie coming out before the Code, Roxie is also depicted as a wild child, which kind of gives this implication that she got what she deserved.

Even before she committed the murder of her beloved, she loved alcohol and jazz, and made her money through means that most American elites would definitely turn their nose down on her for.

Overall Thoughts

This was such an interesting way to be introduced to the story of Chicago, and now I kind of want to watch the early 2000s version of the movie, and even read the play if I can find it online or get my hands on a physical copy through work.

That said, I think that this was a compelling story, and the fact it was a silent movie made it even more compelling to me.

A lot of people nowadays can’t handle silent movies, let alone sitting through a movie for two hours silently (thinking really hard about the movie theaters I’ve been in lately when I type that phrase out), but I do genuinely enjoy the silent films from the past. If you want to understand film history, you kind of need to be able to watch silent films.

All of this is to say I think you should watch this if you haven’t already!

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