Film Forum

(1927, Frank Urson & Cecil B. DeMille) Ripped from the headlines! - for once pretty true. Straight-from-Broadway filming of the play based on the real lover-shooting Beulah Annan case, hitting the screen three years after her sensational Windy City trial (only years later spawning a remake, Roxie Hart, with Ginger Rogers in the title role, and, much later, the Broadway musical smash and Oscar-winning film). In this first and most authentic version,  marvelously blousy Phyllis Haver is Roxie, with future screwball comedy great Eugene Pallette as her victim. Approx. 118 min.

A FLICKER ALLEY RELEASE

Reviews

“This snappy and sexy late silent — it opened in New York in December 1927, two months after The Jazz Singer — is a much superior film to not only its surprisingly threadbare Oscar-winning successor, but is also better than William Wellman’s nonmusical remake Roxie Hart (1942).”
– Lou Lumenick, New York Post