Nothing guarantees immortality for a murderer quite like getting away with it, as Lizzie Borden could have told you. And so could Beulah Annan, the woman who, in 1924, shot a lover foolish enough to announce he was leaving her. Despite, or perhaps because of sensational press coverage nationwide, Beulah walked out of a courtroom thirteen months later as a free woman. The story so captured her city and era that a play, a Broadway musical, and two movie versions bear only the name of Beulah’s hometown as their title: Chicago.
Maurine Dallas Watkins, who covered both Beulah and a similar murderess for the Chicago Tribune, wrote the original 1926 play that held the seeds of all the versions to follow. Watkins, however, gave her anti-heroine a catchier name, Roxie Hart, and it stuck. In fact, there’s a William Wellman-directed version from 1942 called Roxie Hart, with Ginger Rogers in the title role, and Ginger isn’t bad, though it’s an awfully vanilla Roxie. (Heck, she’s not even a killer.)
By 1975 Chicago was exhumed as a Broadway production with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse, a musical that was revived to great acclaim in 1996. It’s a pity that for the 2002 Oscar-winning film, director Rob Marshall slowed down the numbers that needed to sizzle and cranked up the ones that needed some quiet. No matter—the 1996 revival is still on Broadway, after twenty-eight years.
All this is to say: If it’s a movie version you want, in my opinion, your best bet by far is the 1927 silent Chicago. You’ll see how delightful this little cyanide pellet of a story has always been.
This version unspools the simple tale of a simple woman with two simple needs: fortune and fame, in that order. Roxie Hart (Phyllis Haver) is married to Amos (Victor Varconi). Amos works at a news-and-candy stand. Amos is poor, honest, hardworking, and loves his wee girly with all his handsome, sappy heart. Roxie, naturally, is sick to death of him and has been carrying on with Casley (Eugene Pallette), who provides her with the niceties Amos can’t afford.
In this silent movie Pallette is, of course, robbed of his famous voice, which sounded like a bullfrog trying to climb out of a tuba. But Pallette is young(ish), virile, much lighter of frame than in My Man Godfrey nine years later and, more to the point, his character Casley has money. Money that Casley has been spending on Roxie, and money that he has decided, it transpires, to spend on something else. What that something else might be, we are destined never to know, for when Casley arrives at a tryst and rudely announces he’s giving Roxie the air, she airs him in return—with a couple of bullet holes.
Amos, once over the shock of discovering Roxie isn’t the true-blue sweetie he thought, attempts to take the rap for her, but he is foiled by a wily, ambitious assistant district attorney (Warner Richmond). Roxie lands in jail, where she encounters the Matron (May Robson) plus an assortment of other murderers, including Two-Gun Rosie (Viola Louie), the tragic Teresa (who isn’t billed), and “The Real Lady,” later called Velma Kelly in the musicals. The Real Lady is played by a skinny, menacing, and altogether fabulous Julia Faye; she was based on another true-crime character (Belva Gartner) and Faye bears a spooky resemblance to Bebe Neuwirth, who played Velma in the 1996 Broadway revival of Chicago.
The rest of the film is taken up with watching Roxie scheme and feud from jail cell to courtroom, while Amos slides further into chump-dom as he attempts to rob William Flynn (Robert Edeson), the jailhouse lawyer who’s promised to get Roxie an acquittal. The idea is to pay the crooked shyster with his own money, and it’s a pretty good scheme—for someone capable of doing it competently, which, needless to say, Amos is not.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that so far there has been no discussion of the director. Therein lies a tale. The name on the credits is Frank Urson, but an essay included as part of the Flicker Alley DVD liner notes shows that even at the time of the movie’s release, producer Cecil B. DeMille was widely believed to have done most of the directing. Written by fastidious DeMille scholar Robert Birchard, the essay cannot definitively say who was at the helm for most of the shoot. It points out that DeMille took over direction after seven days of photography; then, in the next sentence, asserts: “Urson seems to have directed much of the film.” However! There’s more! In his biography of DeMille, Empire of Dreams, Scott Eyman says the producer wound up “stepping in and directing a fair amount of the picture himself.”
All clear then? No? Then it’s best to look at Chicago itself, which is studded with moments that fairly screech DeMille, such as the opium-den splendor of lawyer Flynn’s lair. Who knew jailhouse work could exist alongside a highly developed taste for chinoiserie, down to an elegant marble inkwell where you can stash your cash? There’s also the major role played by Roxie’s garters, which have little tinkling bells attached to them—very much a DeMille-ish detail. And a catfight between Roxie and The Real Lady is shot in a lip-licking style any viewer of DeMille’s epics will recognize.
Frizzy-haired, sulky-sexy Phyllis Haver was one of Mack Sennett’s original Bathing Beauties at age sixteen, earning a salary of $12 a week before eventually landing a role opposite Buster Keaton in his 1923 short The Balloonatic. Shortly after that, Haver moved on to DeMille’s production company and performances in What Price Glory? (1926), The Way of All Flesh (1927—now lost, alas), and this picture, her biggest and best role. “I wasn’t much of an actress,” she told Sennett in his memoirs, but Sennett begged to differ, and so will anyone who watches Chicago. Haver’s Roxie is a study in comic venality, rejecting any flashes of remorse in the time it takes to powder her nose—in the mirror just shattered by a bullet she fired at her lover.
Roxie makes little pouty-faces at Amos and deploys baby-talk, helpfully spelled out in the intertitles. Judging by this movie, Booth Tarkington’s 1916 novel Seventeen, as well as Boop-A-Doop singer Helen Kane and others, there was an epidemic of female baby-talk in the early 20th century, and it threatened the sanity of many who had to listen to it. Haver plays Roxie like a child in other ways, whether she’s chewing energetically while Amos embraces her or giving him a kittenish look of apology when he accuses her of cheating.
Even the intertitles, not always a boon to a good silent movie, are funny—my favorite being May Robson’s matron rebuking her charges with, “This is a decent jail, you can’t act the way you do at home!” Despite some last-act concessions to conventional morality, Chicago is a rambunctiously cynical film. That’s surely the reason why, almost a century later, you still can’t keep Roxie down.
Presented at ADoS 2025 with live musical accompaniment by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra with Mas Koga and Wayne Barker, conducted by Guenter Buchwald
SFCM Orchestra: Liam Cameron (clarinet), Zoe King (tenor sax), Taylor Hopps (trumpet), Vidyuth Guruvayurappan (tromone), Ben Byham (double bass), Brandon Topolsik (percussion)