Roxie Hart/Thunder Birds

These are two William Wellman films from the early forties, made by Twentieth-Century Fox.

The plot of Roxie Hart will be familiar to many, as it's based on the same source material as the musical Chicago. Ginger Rogers is the title character, a gum-snapping good-time girl who is trying to break into show business. When her sad-sack husband (a very good George Chandler) shoots her lover (and also her manager), Roxie takes the blame in order to get her name in the papers, as female murder suspects are big celebrities in this period, the roaring twenties. She engages the sharpest attorney in the city, Adolphe Menjou, who doesn't care if she's guilty or innocent, just if she has $5,000.

This film is a lot of run, a fizzy confection that tells us right away its tone with this title card: "This picture is dedicated to all the beautiful women in the world who have shot their men full of holes out of pique." Then we see a series of newspaper headlines about murderesses, including "No Recollection of Picking Up Axe, Jilted Girl Testifies." The script, by Nunnally Johnson, crackles with electricity. I liked this exchange by Roxie's parents, upon hearing she's been arrested for murder: "They're gonna hang Roxie, Ma," says her father. "What did I tell you?" says Ma, not pausing in her knitting.

Occasionally the frenzy of the action gets a little too giddy, such as when the entire jailhouse breaks into a spontaneous dance (this is not a musical picture). But Rogers is great--we see lotso of her gorgeous gams, as is Menjou, who is always slightly ruffled (it does the make the mind reel a bit to consider that he and Richard Gere played the same role).

Thunder Birds is a routine military picture, which is interesting more for its connections to Wellman's biography. Set in Arizona at a flight school, Preston Foster plays a hot-shot veteran of World War I who takes a job as a civilian flight instructor. Conveniently, his old girlfriend, Gene Tierney, lives on a ranch down the road. Foster's students include a number of Brits, one of whom, John Sutton, falls for Tierney. He has a problem--he has vertigo, but he wants to fly to live up to the legacy of his father and brother, both aces who were shot down in their particular wars.

The action is an uncomfortable mixture of testosterone and Harlequin romance. Tierney has one of the loveliest faces in film history, so it's easy to see why men would fight over her.

Wellman was a World War I ace who was injured during the war and ended up as a flight instructor. There's a scene in the film when Foster, who was a friend of Sutton's father during the Great War, hands him a photograph of Sutton's father. The photo happens to be of Wellman during his war days.