Women-in-Prison Movies
Chicago, 2002
The only WIP movie to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture (not to mention a Supporting Actress win for Catherine Zeta-Jones), Chicago was based on Maurine Watkins' 1926 Broadway play and its 1975 musical version directed by Bob Fosse. Set in the 1920s and mining the same rich loam as The Front Page — corrupt lawmen, predatory newsmen and winsome cons — the story throws two murderesses, faux-naïve Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) and world-hardened Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones), into a prison run by Mama (Queen Latifah), the typical tough lesbian warden. But this one spells out her demands in song in "When You're Good to Mama." ("Let's all stroke together/ Like the Princeton crew./ When you're strokin' Mama,/ Mama's strokin' you.") The movie's message: when all life is show business, notoriety is celebrity. That's a truism Lindsay Lohan can take to heart, and we don't mean Roxie.