Frank Urson | Chicago / 1927

baby doll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lenore J. Coffee (screenplay, based on the stage play by Maurine Dallas Watkins), Frank Urson (director) Chicago / 1927

 

The original silent film Chicago, based on the 1926 stage play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, was long believed to exist only in prints so difficult to see that it was seldom shown. But a 21st-Century restored a print from the UCLA Film and Television Archive allowing it to be played at festivals and revival houses, and in 2020 Flicker Alley released the film on Blue-ray. A copy of the original also exists at the Gosfilmofond Russian State Archives.

     Unlike the later stage musical by Fred Ebb and John Kander, Frank Urson’s 1927 film version has no obvious gay or even lesbian content, except if one sees a prison cat-fight between two women, Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly, as representational of sapphic love. The Matron Mama Morton of this work (May Robson) is certainly no Mary McCarty (who played the role in the original stage production) or Queen Latifah (who performed it in the film) who is willing to provide rewards for “certain services rendered.” This Mama Morton mostly helps Roxie cut out the newspaper clippings about her infamous murder of Rodney Casley (Eugene Pallette). And there is no Mary Sunshine among the film’s newspaper reporter who on stage was performed by a man in drag; in the 2002 film version, however, played by a woman.

      Yet I’d argue that this early Chicago is one of the most cynical and fascinating indictments of heteronormative marriages and the general patriarchal structure of modern male / female relationships recorded in early 20th century art.

      Husband Amos Hart (Victor Varconi) is so enamored of his trophy wife Roxie’s (Phyllis Haver) peroxided curls, her endless pouts, and her baby-talk mewling that he doesn’t even notice that, created by a system which regularly issues such baby dolls, she’s equally receptive to the erections of any foot, knee, hand, or eyelid attached to any penis who might be able to provide her with enough money that she can properly make-up and costume her doll-like self.

     In the musical Amos describes himself as “Mr. Cellophane” (“Cellophane, Mr. Cellophane shoulda been my name / Mr. Cellophane 'cause you can look right through me / Walk right by me and never know I'm there”), but the film’s Hart is even worse as a boob or idiot who will rob and even kill for the woman who could care less about anyone who isn’t paying attention to what she perceives as her “beautiful self,” real or created. Fortunately, the man whose money he steals, Billy Flynn, is part of the system which demands such fees just to keep the myth of this kind of woman’s attractiveness alive.

      In the Chicagoland USA this film presents every straight man as writhing in agony over Roxie’s every gesture, his feet almost tapping with the pleasure of having the opportunity of spotting her naked knees. She and her kind—particularly with the help of a sleazy preacher-like lawyer such as Flynn (Robert Edeson) who sings the gospel of the heterosexual man’s desires—could shoot down a whole squadron of businessmen and get away with it as long as she mimics the right feminine poses taught to every female by her fathers, uncles, and brothers from her birth. Roxie, evidently having failed her childhood lessons has to be taught by Flynn all over again.

      If writers Watkins and the screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee are correct, the heterosexual mind is entirely devoted to his gaze upon the idealized female figure, whose very presence so completely takes away his breath that he can hardly sniff out the scent of common sense.

      If there is a gay figure lurking among the befuddled males and their aroused libidos, it is the monocled and prissy Asst. District Attorney (Warner Richmond) who, entirely flummoxed by the male adoration of the cheap money-grabbing killer, attempts to speak the truth—although even he spouts the banal American cliches about justice and sexual equality. There can be no sexual equality in a world where one gender demands the other to be the equivalent of a blow-up doll devoted to receiving their endless ejaculations, a word which in this film Roxie gets mixed up with the newspapermen’s “adulations” of her bodily curvations.

      Roxie wins her freedom without comprehending what the word means. She returns home to a man who, instead of people looking through him, now can see through her, and accordingly sends her out the door that Nora in A Doll’s House readily opened and slammed shut all by herself. The problem is that Roxie, still a “doll,” doesn’t want to leave her dollhouse, and has no idea how to even walk the streets. Like the newspaper in the rain that falls into the gutter announcing her as yesterday’s headlines, Roxie staggers and almost falls to the concrete with nowhere to go but down unless she can find another Daddy in the rain to take her home—although presumably the streets will soon teach her how to properly walk.

      Yet this dark comedy’s answer to a woman who might be able to replace Roxie’s absence for Amos Hart and other hard-working heterosexuals like him, proffers perhaps even worse conditions for the cis female gender. Kathie (Virginia Bradford), the loyal rather plain brunette cleaning woman who loves her man with all her heart, is immediately ready to pick up after Amos’ mess, and will presumably go on scrubbing, washing, cooking, and serving herself up as a model wife until death do them part.

       Heterosexual marriage from the viewpoint of this film’s mid-western USA, accordingly, does not present a very encouraging mode of love and life. Perhaps that explains why soon after the studio execs and censors begin to demand it be the only kind of love the screen promoted and permitted to be shown. Surely they were afraid that the two women involved with creating this view of it were right and were committed to sustaining the status quo, nonetheless, as long as they might.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).