Female Trouble and Chicago: Fame, Fortune, and Death

Female Trouble, the John Waters film created in 1974, features the character Dawn Davenport committing several crimes and desiring the spotlight. At a certain point in her life, she even uses those criminal acts as leverage to earn her spotlight. While watching this movie, it made me think back to a movie with a similar presence: Rob Marshall’s Chicago. Why is it that the antics of Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly don’t cause us to cringe and turn up or noses while the story of Dawn Davenport does?

If you haven’t seen Chicago, here’s a brief summary. Roxie cheats on her husband Amos with a man named Fred who promises to make her a star in exchange. When Fred changes his mind, Roxie shoots him and finds herself on death row with Velma. Roxie learns that by manipulating the press and public into seeing her as an innocent woman (with the help of a famous yet fishy lawyer Billy Flynn) she can escape her death sentence. Roxie and Velma compete throughout the film for Billy’s attention in order to get out of jail.

So what does all this have to do with Female Trouble? Well, in both instances, they have independent women who involve themselves in crime and fame. However, even though all three ladies use their criminal actions in order to gain fame and fortune, Roxie and Velma rely on that fame to escape punishment. Dawn goes virtually unpunished (and is often encouraged) until she dies in the electric chair. Perhaps this is one reason that we find ourselves rooting for Roxie and Velma over Dawn. In fact, the women on Murderess Row sing a song (Cell Block Tango) about how their husbands/lovers deserved to die for various reasons, while Dawn only seems to kill people who annoying her or threaten her chance at fame, like her daughter Taffy. One of the reasons she does give when she offers to shoot an audience member for “the sake of art” is very superfluous and not at all sympathetic

In conclusion, the biggest difference between Female Trouble and Chicago is the audience’s ability to empathize and reason with the girl’s criminal actions. In the case of Roxie and Velma, their story takes place in a time period where the concept of women’s rights was barely taking hold, and marital abuse was common place. These women felt they had no other options, and even though it’s not something we as the audience would do ourselves, we have sympathy for their actions. Dawn has no such empathetic background. We see that in her childhood her parents treated her well, but she remained a spoiled little girl. In fact, we as the audience feel more sympathy for Taffy due to her poor upbringing and her attempts to escape it, even though she killed her own father.