MOVIE REVIEW : The Dark Side of Escapism in ‘Chicago Joe’

One of the most poignant side-effects of movies is the way desperate people in squalid cities use them to glitz up tawdry lives: how, imagining themselves as gangsters, glamour girls, supermen, heroines, they make lives without heroism or glamour briefly bearable. That’s the theme of “Chicago Joe and the Showgirl” (Century Plaza and Beverly Center). It shows the dark side of movie-crazy dreams: the real-life nightmares that occasionally seethe out of them.

It’s a pity that it’s a movie gone so wrong in so many ways, because it’s onto something. Based on a real life story, a notorious murder case from World War II’s London Blitz period, it’s about a gun-crazy pair gone psycho on movie fantasies and con-game lies. There’s a 17-year-old stripper, Georgina Grayson (Emily Lloyd), and a psychopathic Yank “soldier” named Carl Gustav Holton, who also uses the aliases “Ricky” and “Chicago Joe.”

In the movie, “Ricky” (his most frequent moniker), claims, obviously falsely, to be an ex- Capone mob man: a lie that proves an aphrodisiac to Georgina, super-fan of Cagney and George Raft movies. This pair, roaming through deserted nighttime streets in a stolen army truck, are like kids running amok in the bombed-out ruins of a crumbling city. Increasingly, she pushes him to more psychopathic stunts: stealing a fur coat, ramming into and looting a cab--and finally, a kind of thrill-killing.

The filmmakers here, director Bernard Rose (“Paperhouse”) and writer David Yallop, are obviously influenced by the whole gangster love on the run tradition, as well as Dennis Potter’s great scripts for “Pennies From Heaven.” But somehow, the right balance between reality and fantasy eludes them. Lloyd and Sutherland have little chemistry; there’s more between Sutherland and a newly brunette Patsy Kensit as his other, “nice” fiancee.

Though he’s good in his final cold-sweat “What-have-I-done?” moments, Kiefer Sutherland doesn’t seem crazy enough in his early scenes. And Lloyd--who may have jumped at the chance, to play a really bad girl--never gets Georgina into focus. She seems a little glazed, petulant, out of it. Except for the sensual frenzy of the moment when she jitterbugs on a seedy dance floor, she misses the sometime poetry of pathology and also its amoral blankness: anything that might explain why this rather simple girl got hooked on the murder of strangers.

There’s probably not enough fantasy in “Chicago Joe and the Showgirl” (MPAA rated R for sex, violence and language) and what there is seems cheap and obvious. This film seems compromised, lethargic, weighed-down, too nailed into Georgina’s dingy danger and squalor: the empty streets and sudden Blitz fires in which she lives pointlessly while dreaming of guns and love, yearning for kiss-kiss-bang-bang.

‘CHICAGO JOE AND THE SHOWGIRL’

A New Line Cinema release of Polygram/Working Title Films/B.S.B. presentation. Producer Tim Bevan. Director Bernard Rose. Script David Yallop. Camera Mike Southon. Editor Dan Rae. With Kiefer Sutherland, Emily Lloyd, Patsy Kensit, Keith Allen.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).