ROXIE HART
(20th Century Fox)
IKE The Talk of the Town, Design for Scandal, and many another Hollywood film, Roxie Hart does not treat the
American iegai system with the dignity it possibly deserves. On the contrary it suggests that Justice is not a virtuous female with bandaged eyes but a bawdy old fellow with one eye closed in a wink and the other wide open and cocked at a shapely pair of legs. But then Roxie Hart is a farce about Chicago 20 years ago, when almost anything was’ liable to happen and it was apparently easier for a pretty woman to get away with first-degree murder than it was for a plain one to get a seat in a street car. "No need to worry; this county wouldn’t hang even Lucrezia Borgia," Roxie Hart, a vaudeville dancer (Ginger Rogers) is told by a reporter when her lover is found shot dead in her flat and her guilty husband accuses her of the crime. Assured of acquittal by her pressagents and her lawyer (Adolphe Menjou) and promised enough front-page pub-. licity to put her on easy street for life, she stakes her legs against her neck, pleads guilty, and faces a susceptible male jury and a judge who likes the limelight almost as much as she does. The trial is a riot, but no less uproarious are the when Roxie herself holds court in the jailhouse for her admirers and backers. A vitago named Two-Gun Gertie temporarily’ threatens to steal her thunder, whereupon Roxie recaptures the headlines by pretending that she is about to become a mother. After that the jury’s decision is never in doubt, but the fun does not slacken, with Ginger Rogers, Menjou, Lynne Overman and the others playing their parts for all they are worth, and a bit over. If anything the farce gets a little out. of hand: there are times when some: restraint would have been more effective. When a story is told in retrospect, as this one is, its chief purpose is usually to arouse a nostalgic regret in the onlooker for the ‘good old days" which it portrays. Roxie Hart will provoke no such emotion, :but only laughter.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19430402.2.34.1.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 197, 2 April 1943, Page 13
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367ROXIE HART New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 197, 2 April 1943, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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