In Old Chicago (1937)

 I saw three classic films. I was going to write a little bit about all of them. The other two were Little Foxes (blah, too melodramatic, but Teresa Wright was good in it) and Lust for Life (the score was overdone and Douglas is at his hammiest here, but I appreciated Vincente Minnelli's work), but I thought I'd write about the third and I ended up writing a full review.

In Old Chicago (1937)-I knew Alice Brady won an Oscar for it, and it was about two brothers torn apart by Chicago politics (which is a pretty intriguing city to explore as opposed to, say, Orlando or Knoxville politics). I don't believe this film is well-remembered today but it certainly was pretty epic in its time. The film was Fox's  response to the MGM film San Francisco in which fictional lives intersect with a major historic event. Because that event is the San Francisco earthquake it's as great an excuse as any to make things go boom and combine a period piece with a psuedo-disaster film.

In this case, the story is the Chicago Fire. I also vaguely knew about Mrs. O'Leary's cow supposedly starting the Chicago Fire (not really true), but I didn't know that the Chicago Fire figured into the story when I was watching the film. I can't speak to whether the film was advertised that way, but I saw that her name was Mrs. O'Leary (Alice Brady) from a sign of her laundromat and she owns a cow, so I did spend quite a bit of time wondering if the pieces will fit

What I later learned from the production notes is that the story was reverse-engineered from the Mrs. O'Leary character. Because there's not a lot of history to draw from, O'Leary is a symbol from which Alice Brady can act her heart out to an Oscar and from which the writers can lay the symbolic groundwork. She represents a certain Yankee ingenuity.  Her establishing character moment is when she reacts to an unpleasant encounter with a snooty socialite by offering to clean her dress for a price.

Her sons represent the dark and lighter sides of that ingenuity, and there are references made to the fact that the O'Learys are a special kind of clan. The older son (Tyrone Power) is a lawyer who leads a life of service. The middle son (Don Ameche, kind of funny because I've only ever seen him as an octeganarian in Cocoon) is a lot more fun but he's a pretty bad guy. He makes his living as a gambler with the capacity for some pretty devious (and clever) schemes for taking power through the city. The younger son does almost nothing except marry a Swedish girl and identify a dead body at the end, which makes me wonder why he was even included in the script. Her her children are pretty much entirely fictionalized anyway, right? Also, I believe it's Andy Divine who's in there somewhere with this uniquely squealy voice. Did anyone inform him this wasn't a comedy?

In a lot of ways, this film reminded me of Gangs of New York right down to one of the shots of two marching armies approaching each other on the street. It's about a city coming of age and characters morally doing the same.

I found it refreshingly devoid of genre trappings. It was about crime but it wasn't a generic gangster film, it was about family dynamics but it wasn't a sappy melodrama.  It was appropriately epic.