'In this town, murder is a form of entertainment'. The town is prohibition-era Chicago, but it might equally be any town today, where so many of us are captivated and diverted by the trials of O.J. Simpson or Michael Barrymore.

Velma Kelly is a flapper whose scandalous jazz act is the toast of Chicago. Roxie Hart is an unhappily married ex-chorus girl driven by her dream to have an act just like Velma's. By chance, both are arrested for murder on the same night, and put in the Cook County Jail. There, as they await trial, their rivalry is ignited, with each vying for the attention of venal attorney Billy Flynn, in the hope that he can get them released, or, even better, on stage again.

I have to declare an interest here. I HATE almost all musicals. Few things annoy me more than characters on screen bursting into 'spontaneous' song-and-dance routines in the middle of a dramatic sequence. It is a type of stylisation that always seems better suited to the stage. Yet the film 'Chicago' has been successfully transformed from its original incarnations as both stage play and stage musical into a uniquely cinematic experience. Screenwriter Bill Condon and director Rob Marshall have achieved this by carefully integrating the songs into the drama. Routines are either actual performances given by characters onstage, or, as is more often the case, they reflect the perspective of Roxie, who imagines her whole life as though it were one of the stageshows with which she is so obsessed. Marshall intercuts these numbers with less glamorous glimpses of what Roxie is really experiencing, so that the songs come to represent an artificially sweetened view of a bitter world - a world of adultery, perjury, and cold-blooded murder.

Renee Zellweger shines as Roxie, reprising her role of deluded fantasist from 'Nurse Betty'. The film's twin perspective certainly puts the rest of the cast through their paces, requiring each of them essentially to play two different parts - but all prove equal to the task. Richard Gere is particularly good as the odious Billy Flynn, who understands - but in a different, more cynical way than Roxie - that everything in life is an act. The manner in which his character 'razzledazzles' the media, the jury, and the public, makes him a figure very much of our own times.

'Chicago' shows great satirical insight into the fickle nature of celebrity, and the vanity of stars; and the lyrics of its songs are full of wit; but if none of this appeals, there's always the garters, the juice, and the whoopee.

Anton Bitel 18/01/03