by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was In Old Chicago, one of the legendary blockbuster hits of the 1930’s and one I hadn’t
caught up with until now. It was inspired by the success of MGM’s San
Francisco from 1936, a story of graft and
lawlessness on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast that ended with a spectacular
depiction of the 1906 earthquake and fire. Fox production head Darryl F. Zanuck
budgeted $2 million for this film (though he actually brought it in at $1.8
million, $200,000 under budget —
at the time the most expensive movie ever made, at $2.5 million, was Howard
Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, which
wasn’t surpassed until Gone with the Wind came in at $4.25 million) and cut a loan-out deal with MGM by which
Clark Gable and Jean Harlow would star in In Old Chicago in exchange for Shirley Temple going to MGM to play
Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Then
Harlow died, and Zanuck refused to accept any other MGM female star; instead,
he called the deal off, Judy Garland got to play Dorothy, and Zanuck made In
Old Chicago with his own contract players,
Tyrone Power and Alice Faye. (Ironically, this was just months after Zanuck had
told Faye to darken her hair and change her eyebrows so she wouldn’t look so
much like Harlow, which Zanuck felt was holding her career back!) The result was
a blockbuster hit at the time and a fascinating movie today, one which works
brilliantly on its own terms despite the sheer preposterousness of the story,
which not surprisingly took the legend that the 1871 Chicago fire was started
by a cow in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn kicking over a lantern and ran with it.
This
one has been pretty well debunked by more recent historians of the fire, but
Zanuck and his writers — Niven Busch, story; Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levien,
script — not only depicted it but made the O’Leary family the central
characters of his film. Molly O’Leary (Alice Brady, who won an Academy Award
for Best Supporting Actress for the film — probably because she plays the role
with quiet dignity and strength and no doubt astonished Academy voters by showing
she could do other things than the marvelous comic ditz she’d been in The
Gay Divorcée!), her husband and their three
boys Dion (Gene Reynolds), Jack (Billy Watson) and Bob (Bobby Watson) are shown
in a covered wagon in 1854, heading west to settle in the new city of Chicago
and build new lives there. Only hubby decides to see if his wagon can outrun a
train that’s passing by, loses, gets catapulted from the wagon and dies, though
not before a drawn-out dying speech that made me joke, “He’s a movie Irishman!
He can’t shut up!” Molly tries
for a job as a showgirl and is horrified at what she’s being asked to do (and
how little she’s expected to wear while she’s doing it); her boys are helping
some of the entertainers into the saloon in question when at the sight of their
mom they drop one of the women and soil her dress; Molly offers to wash it, and
thus she starts a thriving business as a laundress. A series of soap bubbles
with dates on them advance the story from 1854 to 1867 (a montage transition
that totally ignores the Civil War, even though during the bubble sequence the
O’Leary boys have grown to military age and would therefore have been
confronted with the draft — the only hint of the war comes later when the
villain turns out to be an ex-slaverunner).
The O’Learys have settled in The
Patch, Chicago’s poorest and seediest area, and Dion, Jack and Bob have grown
up to be Tyrone Power, Don Ameche and Tom Brown, respectively. Bob is the
comic-relief brother — he flirts with, and ultimately marries, mom’s German
maid Gretchen (June Storey) after the infamous cow literally kicks them into an embrace. Jack is an aspiring
attorney and Dion is a gambler who runs afoul of saloon owner Gil Warren (Brian
Donlevy, the villain of the piece) when he makes a play for Gil’s star
entertainer, Belle Fawcett (Alice Faye). Dion and his brothers stumble on a
plan Gil Warren and his political machine have hatched to re-route the
streetcar line so it passes property they own when they see the plan literally
mapped out on a tablecloth from Warren’s saloon he’s sent to Mrs. O’Leary for
laundering (the sign on her delivery truck identifies her business as “Mrs.
O’Leary’s French Laundry,” which Charles pointed out was 19th
century-speak for a dry cleaner; at the time the solvent dry cleaners generally
used was gasoline, which certainly makes it believable that a catastrophic fire
could start on her premises). With financial backing from a U.S. Senator who is
a regular at Warren’s place but wants to get out from under his thumb, Dion
(whose name is pronounced “DYE-on,” by the way, instead of the more normal
“DEE-on”) starts his own saloon with Belle as his star attraction, after he’s
got her to fall in love with him literally by wrestling her to the ground (there’s an oddly kinky hit of S/M
about virtually all the
male-female relationships in this film, and Darryl F. Zanuck was enough of a
man of the world he was probably well aware of what he was getting by the naïfs at the Production Code Administration; oddly, the
one bit of grief Zanuck did get
from censor Joseph Breen was a demand that he rewrite the script to eliminate
any hint that Alice Faye’s character was a prostitute). With his own saloon as
a base, Dion works on building up his own political machine, and the film
builds up to the 1870 election for Mayor of Chicago. Gil Warren is running
himself, and the “reform” element (who, as in such noir classics as Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass
Key and James M. Cain’s Love’s
Lovely Counterfeit, are really just as
corrupt as the people they’re trying to displace) nominate, of all people,
Dion’s brother Jack to run against him.
Dion ostensibly supports Warren but
secretly pulls strings, getting all Warren’s corrupt vote-getters arrested on
election eve and held without bail for 24 hours, so his brother will win — only
to find that his brother actually means to keep his campaign promise to tear
down the entire Patch and put up new, safer brick buildings in place of the old
wooden ones. Only he doesn’t have to do that because Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicks
over that lantern and the Patch, and later much of the rest of Chicago, burns
down in the 1871 fire (which in real life killed 300 people, rendered 100,000
homeless and caused $2 million in property damage). While the city is burning a
riot starts in the Patch after Warren spreads the news that Jack O’Leary (like
Nero) deliberately set the fire to facilitate his plan to destroy the Patch,
and Jack is shot and actually killed by Warren’s bodyguard (Rondo Hatton; he’s
listed in the credits simply as “Body Guard” — two words — but he’s actually
addressed as “Rondo” on screen), while Warren is trampled by a herd of cattle
fleeing the fire (the only
intimation we’ve got in the whole movie of Chicago’s importance as a
meat-packing center) and Dion and Belle are reunited at the end, pledging to
realize Jack’s dream of a cleaner, more durably built Chicago of the future.
Wisely Zanuck and his director, Henry King — an odd choice for a spectacular
film like this because his great strength was getting quiet, understated
performances from his actors, but this is the sort of story where you want to see the leads ham it up, but he’d directed Power
in his star-making film, Lloyd’s of London, and obviously Zanuck was counting on the magic
happening again — avoided copying the famous shot at the end of San
Francisco in which the ruined city
dissolved into a shot of the modern city as of the time the film was made.
(Zanuck would do that idea three
years later at the end of Brigham Young, in which the devastated Mormon settlement dissolves into Salt Lake
City as it appeared in 1940.)
In Old Chicago is an odd movie, and some of the issues it raises —
notably the desire of a city’s “respectable” corporate elite to use a disaster
to accomplish a major urban renewal project and upscale a city by driving out
its poor people — play quite differently in the post-Katrina era than they no
doubt did in 1937, when the audience’s sympathies were definitely supposed to
be with the modernizers destroying the rambunctious Patch and replacing it with
newer, presumably cleaner and safer workers’ housing and morally “safe”
businesses. At the same time one could readily imagine a more rambunctious,
more exciting movie being made on the same plot — at one point I found myself
thinking Darryl Zanuck had gone to the wrong studio for the loan-outs he
originally wanted and should have gone to his old stomping grounds, Warner
Bros., for James Cagney and Bette Davis instead (though Davis would have needed
a voice double for the music-hall songs Faye performs with her adequate foghorn
of a voice). Not that Tyrone Power is wrong; he’s quite capable as the gambler who’s mastered
the veneer of sophistication to disguise his lower-class origins — but there
are some scenes in which one aches for the energy (and the authentic Irishness
— the Powers were also of Irish ancestry but they didn’t wear it on their
sleeves the way Cagney did) Cagney could have brought to the role (and he’d
have been a lot more believable than Power as a man who literally has to beat the woman he wants as his girlfriend
into submission!). Still, In Old Chicago is a movie that works brilliantly on its own terms; one can readily
see what attracted 1937 audiences to it in droves, and it still holds up as
good entertainment today — and the disaster sequences (credited to H. Bruce
Humberstone as second-unit director) also hold up, particularly the scenes
(making the San Francisco
inspiration especially obvious) in which the burning buildings literally collapse towards the audience.
