Chicago
20027.1movie
Where to Watch
MGM Plus
Paramount+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.
MGM PlusParamount+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.
Chicago is an American musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Ebb and Bob Fosse. Set in Chicago in the Jazz Age, the musical is based on the 1926 play of the same name by Maurine Dallas Watkins, then a journalist covering the city's courthouse beat. A satire on corruption in the administration of criminal justice, the plot follows felons who manipulate their stories to develop celebrity status.
Killers were romanticized or vilified, cops and lawyers and reporters lived in each other’s pockets, and newspapers read like pulp fiction. There’s an inspired scene of ventriloquism and puppetry at a press conference, with all of the characters dangling from strings. For Fosse, the Chicago of Roxie Hart supplied the perfect peg to hang his famous hat. The movie doesn’t update the musical so much as bring it to a high electric streamlined gloss. The director Rob Marshall, a stage veteran making his big screen debut, paces the film with gusto.
