Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1937

The Contenders:

The Awful Truth
Captains Courageous
Dead End
The Good Earth
In Old Chicago
The Life of Emile Zola (winner)
Lost Horizon
One Hundred Men and a Girl
Stage Door
A Star is Born

A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

Film: In Old Chicago
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I’ve set up my NetFlix queue to be frontloaded with all of the “very long wait” films at the top. What this means is that I typically get one of those films because there are so many of them. That’s great, but it also means that what shows up on a given day is something of a crapshoot. I’m never sure what I’m going to get, and sometimes I get something that’s not really what I’m in the mood to watch. Such is the case with In Old Chicago, a bizarre little film that combines a lot of plots and a spurious legend.

What spurious legend? That’s not too difficult to figure out. The film takes place in Chicago in the 1870s and the main characters last name is O’Leary. Think there’s going to be a fire? Think it might get started by a cow kicking over a lantern? The shame of In Old Chicago is that it isn’t specifically about the Chicago fire, because that might have been more interesting and certainly would have been a hell of a lot less misogynistic.