Chicago can make cinema so special

I don’t get out to the movie theater as much as I used to, but I am still a fan of film. One of my favorite genres, so to speak, is Chicagoana.

Maybe that is just evidence of how much of a Chicago-geek I can be, but I have found that the presence of the Second City on the silver screen can add such character to a film that even a clunker becomes bearable.

WHEN A WELL-written screenplay is combined with competent acting and a Chicago setting, the result is a film that registers in my brain as unforgettable.

A Chicago connection is why I am actually looking forward to two upcoming films, and will try to get to the theater to see them. “Chicago 10,” which purports to be documentary-like but is really a dramatic retelling of the insanity that hit the United States in the summer of 1968, was released in Chicago on Friday.

The other is “Public Enemies,” which stars Johnny Depp, in the story of John Dillinger and will feature his jail break in Lake County, Ind., and his eventual slaughter by the feds outside the (still-standing) Biograph Theater. It will be made this spring at area locations (including the county jail in Crown Point, Ind.), and is to be released early next year.

WITH CHARACTERS LIKE Judge Julius Hoffman, Dillinger and Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, these films have potential to be entertaining. With the presence of Chicago, they ought to be interesting. And if they wind up as clunkers, it will be director incompetence – not the setting.

The real question is how they will wind up comparing to some of the all-time great films that use Chicago. It will be interesting to see if either film can displace any of my own personal “top 5” Chicago films, which I am listing chronologically.

CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948): This dramatic re-telling of how Chicago Times reporters were able to clear a man wrongly convicted of a long-forgotten 1930s police slaying intrigues me because of how it uses Chicago scenery.

Back in an era when most films were shot in studios, this film actually sought out many of the sites associated with the real story. Seeing the courtrooms at the Criminal Courts building, the New City police district (now East Chicago Avenue station) and the reception areas and cellblocks at Stateville Penitentiary back when they all were new and clean is a shock.

Hearing the Back of the Yards neighborhood when Polish was the language that wafted through the air (rather than the current Spanish) gives me a sense of the ethnic feel that will always be a part of Chicago’s character – even if the actual ethnicities change over time.

And when James Stewart’s reporter character, McNeil, goes to the Illinois Parole Board to plead his “case,” he makes his argument in a room I am all too familiar with. What was once the Illinois Supreme Court chambers is now a legislative committee meeting room where politicos ram through public policies that put their interests ahead of the people.

MEDIUM COOL (1969): This film tried to tell a story that was still very contemporary – we get to see the Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the infamous riots that broke out between Chicago police and anti-war protesters who were upset that Democrats were not doing enough to get the army out of Vietnam.

In fact, filmmakers shot some of their footage during the actual protests in Grant Park, and one of their camera operators got hit with teargas along with the protesters.

Anybody who watches “Chicago 10” should go out of their way to see this film, which worked real footage with the actors. The new film, regardless of how true it tries to be to fact, is by definition a revisionist account.

Chicago in this film looks a little more like its contemporary counterpart, although watching scenes shot in the South Loop where protesters interact with police and the National Guard show just how decrepit that part of the city was becoming.

Then, there’s my own personal favorite scene, where Illinois State Police officers are rehearsing how to cope with anti-war demonstrators. What makes the scene so funny is that some police play the part of Hippies and allow themselves to be arrested – that is, if you can envision Hippies in crew cuts and Bermuda shorts going around saying, “peace” and “love.”

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980): Let’s be honest. This is a stupid film.

The story is truncated and, in some parts, absurd. (Dropping a car with would-be Nazi stormtroopers from hundreds of feet in the air and expecting us to believe they would survive?) The blues music sung by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd is all wrong – it’s more Memphis soul and Detroit r&b than Chicago blues. This is a mediocre Saturday Night Live sketch dragged out to 2 ½ hours.

BUT WHAT MAKES the film bearable, in fact what makes it memorable, is Chicago.

Unlike “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” where the lead character plays hooky by going to the Art Institute and Wrigley Field, this film digs into the seedy underbelly that is the real Chicago.

Watching Elwood Blues show off the power of his one-time Mount Prospect police car by jumping the fully-erect 95th Street Bridge that separates the South Chicago neighborhood from the East Side is unique because no other film would even dream of using that site.

THE BLUES BROTHERS also lets us see the extinct seedy strip that used to exist along Van Buren Street in the South Loop, the real Maxwell Street market and the old Dixie Square Shopping Center in south suburban Harvey.

Even when The Blues Brothers goes to an upscale location like the Chez Paul (the long-defunct French restaurant), we get to see some of the most uncouth behavior ever envisioned on screen. Those snobs deserve to have to endure Jake and Elwood.

I have just one gripe. According to the story, Jake and Elwood are from Calumet City and visit the orphanage where they were raised. In reality, nothing in the film was shot there, and I know because I am a one-time Cal City resident who first saw this film at the River Oaks Theater.

UNTOUCHABLES (1988): From the Sean Connery character’s spiel about doing things “the Chicago Way,” to seeing scenes in the LaSalle Street financial district and realizing the buildings haven’t changed much since the 1920s, this film is Chicago.

Robert DeNiro as Alphonse Capone was interesting, even though DeNiro is only in a few scenes and is actually a minor character.

Now I realize that the film’s facts are totally skewed (Frank Nitti didn’t die from being thrown off the criminal courthouse roof). But the film gives a sense of Chicago as it existed 80-something years ago, and successfully uses the parts of the city that have changed little in appearance. Every time I have business at Union Station, I can envision the film’s climactic gun battle.

In my mind, the title “The Untouchables” has come to mean this film, rather than the 1960s-era television series based on the Oscar Fraley book of the same name that tells the tale of how Chicago-based G-man Eliot Ness led a team of agents in combating The Outfit.

ONLY THE LONELY (1991): John Candy and Jim Belushi make totally unrealistic Chicago police officers (what kind of cop gets transferred to a precinct in Florida?) in this film about a man (Candy) who remains a little too attached to his mother (played by Maureen O’Hara).

The film gets it right in understanding that in Chicago, even white people have a sense of their ethnic roots. It has its characters hanging around the neighborhoods, rather than at downtown tourist sites.

And it also contains my favorite Chicago film scene ever – Candy’s first-date picnic with Ally Sheedy with the exploding scoreboard at the old Comiskey Park looming in the background. This film was shot just months before the one-time “Baseball Palace of the World” was torn town.

OF COURSE, THE presence of Chicago cannot save all films. One of my least favorite films ever was “Switching Channels” (1987), which is all the worse because of the ridiculous way it portrays the city.

The film is an attempt to update “The Front Page” (1931 and 1974) and “His Girl Friday (1940) to the modern era. These reporters are not newspaper-people; they work in television. One character goes so far as to denigrate newspapers as, “19th Century journalism.”

KATHLEEN TURNER PLAYS Christy Colloran, an anchorwoman who supposedly covers all the big stories that take place in Chicago County.

Chicago County? We live in Cook.

About the closest I can come to saying anything nice about this film is to note that it also stars Burt Reynolds as Turner’s editor, and it isn’t any worse than any of the “Smokey and the Bandit” films.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Chicago municipal government has a separate agency devoted to (http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalEntityHomeAction.do?entityName=Film+Office&entityNameEnumValue=15) working with film crews wishing to use the city as a backdrop.