Chicago (2002)
Directed by Rob Marshall
Murderesses Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart find themselves on death row together and fight for the fame that will keep them from the gallows in 1920s Chicago.
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31 films that influenced Chicago
What critics say influenced Chicago
The vampy silhouettes of "The Cell Block Tango" here recall the women of "Hey, Big Spender" in Fosse's "Sweet Charity" — leggy and threatening as they pose in a line, sharply defined by the camera.
Not that you'd notice, for he does as Fosse did with Sweet Charity, his film directing debut, and invests the camera with the agility of a dancer.
Marshall quotes from Pennies from Heaven, too (Gere�s striptease in "All I Really Need Is Love" is a nod to Christopher Walken as the tap-dancing pimp), and Gold Diggers of 1933 and Jailhouse Rock (together, in the knockout "Cell Block Tango" sextet, where Roxie�s jailmates sing the stories of the homicides that landed them in the clink).
From its jaunty score and smoky-nightclub motifs to its robust and vibrant dancing, their Chicago evokes Cabaret while also carving its own Jazz-Age identity.
You can't help wondering what Fosse would have done to add some panache and ferocity toa film version of Chicago, a musical that was created in the mid-seventies, after his movies Cabaret and Lenny, and before the autobiographical All That Jazz.
Socking out her songs and story on stage, cluing us in to all the dirt from the time she shoots her faithless lover to her sensational trial and its strange aftermath, star-struck Roxie turns her sordid saga into a glitzy vaudeville act, while a slithery emcee-bandleader (Taye Diggs) calls the shots, a la "Cabaret."At…
Those of us lucky enough to have seen his production, with songs by Kander and Ebb that stand comparison with their Cabaret score, can still remember Jerry Orbach as Roxie�s grandstanding lawyer, Billy Flynn, transforming himself into Clarence Darrow for his big courtroom number, "Razzle Dazzle."
It seems inconceivable that we’ll have a sustained period of musicals on the big screen that can equate to the era between and including West Side Story and Cabaret.
It's similar to the way Fosse himself transformed Harold Prince's "Cabaret" for the screen, some 30 years ago, by putting its musical numbers into a logical context (in that case, on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub), and it works splendidly.
Sound a little more complex than Singin' in the Rain (a fine little musical, in its own right)?
Personally, I don't think it equals "My Fair Lady," "Oklahoma," "Singin' in the Rain," "The Music Man," "The Sound of Music," or "Cabaret," but it's right up there with the best of them.
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Yet pictures like Evita and Moulin Rouge almost seem like appetizers when compared to Chicago, a knockout of a musical that, among other achievements, finds Catherine Zeta-Jones in her best screen work to date, Richard Gere delivering his finest effort since An Officer and a Gentleman, and Renee Zellweger adding to her then-noteworthy string of unassailable performances.
Marshall quotes from Pennies from Heaven, too (Gere�s striptease in "All I Really Need Is Love" is a nod to Christopher Walken as the tap-dancing pimp), and Gold Diggers of 1933 and Jailhouse Rock (together, in the knockout "Cell Block Tango" sextet, where Roxie�s jailmates sing the stories of the homicides that landed them in the clink).
And “Cell Block Tango,” a larger-than-life tune showcasing the various women inmates, pumps and grinds with a spot-on intensity that actually manages to out-do the title dance number in “Jailhouse Rock.”
Visually, Chicago might rank among the more claustrophobic musicals — most of the numbers are performed in dark interiors — but the actors' energy and Marshall's imaginative staging are strong enough that they make the entire picture seem as open-aired as Julie Andrews' hilltop warbling in The Sound of Music.
Personally, I don't think it equals "My Fair Lady," "Oklahoma," "Singin' in the Rain," "The Music Man," "The Sound of Music," or "Cabaret," but it's right up there with the best of them.
More accessible than last year’s admirable, but headache-inducing “Moulin Rouge,” “Chicago” is the New Musical of the 21st Century that we’ve all been waiting for, and it’s well on it’s way to becoming the first musical to win a Best Picture Oscar since 1968’s “Oliver!”
Well, if "Oliver!" could win in 1968, certainly "Chicago" deserves its accolades.
On Oscar night back in 2003, it walked away with six Oscars, including the top prize of Best Picture, becoming the first musical to do so since “Oliver!” over three decades earlier.
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It seems inconceivable that we’ll have a sustained period of musicals on the big screen that can equate to the era between and including West Side Story and Cabaret.
It also gets you reminiscing about how great musicals can be: "Singin' in the Rain," "West Side Story," "An American in Paris," etc.
Based on William Wellman's 1942 crime-comedy movie "Roxie Hart"--in which Ginger Rogers played doll-faced Roxie and Adolphe Menjou was the duplicitous Flynn--the story carries us back to the high-spirited, violent gangland Chicago of "The Front Page" or "Some Like It Hot."