Roxie Hart (20th Century-Fox, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 26) my husband Charles and I watched a 1942 20th Century-Fox film called Roxie Hart, based on a story better known as Chicago. The original play Chicago was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who was born in Louisville or Lexington, Kentucky in July 1896. Watkins’s original ambition was to be a classic Greek scholar, but she changed when, while attending Radcliffe College, she took a workshop in playwriting from Harvard professor George Pierce Baker. He urged his students to work in some other job that would give them experience of the real world before they knuckled down and became playwrights, and accordingly Watkins took a job as reporter for the Chicago Tribune and worked there for eight months. During that time she became known as one of the “sob sisters,” women reporters who wrote tear-jerking stories about women who’d drifted from the straight and narrow and become involved in scandals. Among the women she wrote about were two showgirls, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Sheriff Annan, who were accused of murder. Thanks at least in part due to Watkins’s favorable stories about them, they were both acquitted even though Watkins herself was convinced they were guilty. When she quit the Tribune she wrote a play called Chicago in which Gaertner and Annan were fused into Roxie Hart, aspiring musical star who when a man is shot dead in her apartment hits on the idea of falsely confessing to his murder, on the grounds that no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Chicago before and going through with a trial and her subsequent acquittal will be a boost to her show-business career. Chicago was produced on Broadway in 1926, with George Abbott directing and Francine Larrimore as Roxie, and a year later it was filmed as a silent with Phyllis Haver as Roxie.

In 1942 20th Century-Fox bought the remake rights and filmed it as Roxie Hart, with William K. Wellman directing, Ginger Rogers as Roxie, and Adolphe Menjou as her high-powered attorney, Billy Flynn. After 1941 Watkins, who’d retired from writing and moved from Hollywood to Florida after the death of her father, became an intensely committed Christian and donated most of her money to establish Greek and Latin courses at Bible colleges. In the 1960’s Bob Fosse approached Watkins for the rights to do Chicago as a Broadway musical, only Watkins turned him down because she still felt guilty that her role in the original stories had led to two murderesses going free. After Watkins died in 1969, her estate agreed to let Fosse buy the rights, and the resulting stage musical opened in 1975, with Fosse’s wife Gwen Verdon as Roxie and Chita Rivera as her stage partner Velma Kelly. The story’s film rights lingered in development hell for a quarter-century and various projected versions were floated, including one which would have co-starred Liza Minnelli as Roxie and her half-sister Lorna Luft as Velma, before the movie was finally made in 2002, with Rob Marshall directing, Bill Condon writing, Renée Zellwegger as Roxie, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Velma, and Richard Gere as the slimy attorney Billy Flynn. The 2002 Chicago film was the surprise winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. The 1942 film opens in that year, with bartender O’Malley (William Frawley, best known today as Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy) and reporter Homer Howard (George Montgomery, annoying as usual), reminiscing about the good old days of the 1920’s and the notorious case of Roxie Hart (Ginger Rogers, wearing a dark wig that was supposed to make her look like a redhead; ironically her natural hair color was brown but she’d been bleaching herself blonde for a decade) in particular.

We then see the outside of Roxie’s apartment with two bullet holes appearing in the door and four shots being heard on the soundtrack. The murder victim is a would-be producer who was trying to seduce Roxie with promises of stardom even though Roxie already had a husband, Amos (George Chandler), though as part of his pre-trial strategy Billy Flynn tells them to divorce. Though Roxie didn’t shoot the victim (and the script by Nunnally Johnson and an uncredited Ben Hecht never for sure tells us who did, though Amos Hart is arrested for the crime at the end after Roxie’s acquittal – oh, did I spoil it?), she decides to confess to the crime anyway but claim she did so in self-defense. A hanger-on named Jake Callahan (Lynne Overman) who claims to be Roxie’s agent arranges for the famous defense counsel Billy Flynn (Adolphe Menjou) to represent her, and Flynn carefully coaches her in her self-defense claim. While Roxie is still in jail awaiting trial, another woman, Gertie “Two-Gun” Baxter (Iris Adrian, who looks amazingly butch for a woman in a 1942 movie and shows up wearing a man’s shirt and blue jeans at a time when almost nobody in movies, aside from actors playing farmers, wore jeans), is suddenly arrested after committing murder in the course of a bank robbery. Roxie feels that the all-important tabloid publicity is slipping away from her and moving to Gertie, so she cooks up the lie that she’s pregnant and thus regains the media spotlight. The trial begins and prosecutor Martin Harrison (Morris Ankrum) amasses enough evidence against Roxie she gets worried that she’s going to hang anyway despite all the pre-trial assurances that the state of Illinois doesn’t execute women. Then Roxie takes the stand herself (something she was initially unwilling to do until Flynn tells her that legendary Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld is in the courtroom) and recites the story she and Flynn have carefully rehearsed – and for some reason Wellman, Johnson, and Hecht didn’t include any scenes of Martin Harrison cross-examining her.

Instead the film cuts to Flynn’s closing argument to the jury, during which Flynn has told her to cry, only he has to tell her to back off when she overdoes it. The moment Flynn takes the bouquet of flowers Roxie has been holding in court, throws it on the ground, and literally crushes it underfoot as he reaches the climactic line in his speech pleading with the jury not to crush both Roxie’s life and that of her unborn (and really nonexistent) baby, he has the jury (who’d already been ogling Roxie through the trial; the jury is all-male, and given that the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote had only been in effect for seven years when this story takes place, that’s not surprising) in the palm of his hands. There’s a cut to two sets of newspapers outside the courtroom, one headlined “ROXIE GUILTY!” and the other “ROXIE FREED!,” and when the acquittal comes through, there’s a hand signal out the courtroom window to signal the paper’s delivery people to release the one with “ROXIE FREED!” as the headline. Only just when Roxie Hart is expecting to bask in the publicity of her new-found freedom, another tabloid-hot case breaks out in the courthouse building and the reporters who’d been following Roxie’s trial suddenly break off and ignore her in favor of the latest headline story. The film ends in 1942, when reporter Homer Howard is being picked up at O’Malley’s bar by a woman in a car. It’s Roxie, of course, and after the trial she married Howard and they’ve been steadily cranking out kids all that time, with another on their way (she tells us that indirectly by saying to Homer that pretty soon they’ll have to get a bigger car).

Roxie Hart also has some other mordant scenes, including ones in which the trial is being photographed by Babe (the young Phil Silvers) and a gang of newspaper guys, who periodically demand at every dramatic moment that the trial pause so they can get a meticulously staged photo of the Big Scene. (You watch these scenes and think it’s no wonder that photographers were banned from trials for many years – and in federal trials, they still are.) There’s also a scene in which Roxie (temporarily) jilts Howard for O’Malley when O’Malley boasts that he has a Packard car – and in the 1942 framing scenes Howard asks O’Malley what happened to that Packard, and O’Malley said he lost it in the 1929 stock-market crash and ensuing Great Depression like everything else he owned. Though it’s not a great film the way the 2002 Chicago is, Roxie Hart has plenty of mordant comments to make about tabloid culture and the transitory nature of fame, especially unearned fame. Ginger Rogers’s performance is sprightly, even though at first my husband Charles mistook her for Barbara Stanwyck (and, as with so many other films of the classic era, it might have been better with Stanwyck as Roxie; a year later Stanwyck and Wellman worked together in Lady of Burlesque, another entertaining tale about the dark side of show business), and her high point is the black-bottom dance she and several other women prisoners perform impromptu in the jail. Though one can fantasize this movie with Fred Astaire playing Billy Flynn and the two of them ending up dancing together on the screen, Rogers’s dancing is first-rate on her own (her and Astaire’s choreographer, Hermes Pan, designed the dances), and this scene may have inspired Fosse and his collaborators on the musical, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, to stage the spectacular jailhouse production numbers in the 1975 Chicago musical.