But Marshall isn't out to punish anybody. "Chicago" sets up every bit of potential sentimentality and phony virtue for laughs. Gere's slick shyster, Billy Flynn, may sing "All I Care About Is Love," but we know all he cares about is moola and we laugh with him at his open corruption, which certainly looks a hell of a lot more fun than the honest, dogged persistence of Colm Feore's prosecutor. At times, as when Zellweger's Roxie pretends to collapse on the witness stand after proclaiming, "I did it to save my husband's innocent, unborn baby!" "Chicago" seems like sweet payback for every bit of sentimental eyewash we've ever had to sit through at the movies. When the movie's reporters eat up Roxie's sweet-little-miss routine as she turns the murder of her lover into a tale of an expectant mother protecting her unborn child, we laugh, wondering who could be so gullible. But nobody laughs at the current newspaper ads for "Antwone Fisher" in which the likes of Marian Wright Edelman laud it as inspiring and life changing.

"Chicago" harks back to the Hollywood movies of the early '30s, before the production code came in. Those movies were wisecracking, wised-up, anti-authoritarian, cheerfully cynical, hard-nosed and blessedly nonjudgmental. (Nobody batted an eye in the 1932 "Night Nurse" when bootlegger Clark Gable knocked off the hoods threatening Barbara Stanwyck, or when she rode off with Gable at the movie's end.) It's a great reminder of how, when we trust our native casualness and skepticism, American entertainment can be bracingly disrespectful.

That tone, of course, isn't going to be right for every musical. It wouldn't, for instance, suit a light, romantic musical. But the lessons "Chicago" offers for the American movie musicals that will surely follow shouldn't be ignored. Sure-footed, light on its feet and fast, fast, fast, "Chicago" clocks in at just under two hours. The movie never gets bogged down in the period sets or costumes -- we're never asked to pay attention to them rather than to the actors. And the music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb (one of the great American musical scores) have none of that forced energy and false rhythm that hovers around the dreaded phrase "show tunes."

Essentially a pastiche of pop music styles of the '20s and early '30s, the score is memorable and spicy. Kander and Ebb give their songs just the right touch of cynicism without turning them sour, as Sondheim almost always does. (The closing number, "Nowadays," is a perfect example of the slightly acrid melancholy Sondheim always overdoes.)

Speed, lightness, momentum, wit -- those are the things that the musical filmmakers who follow should take from Rob Marshall. But the musical revival is not going to happen if what we get are movie versions of the top-heavy clunkers that have been littering up Broadway and London since the '80s -- "Les Miz," "Cats," "Miss Saigon," "Phantom" (which, God help us, is supposedly on the way from director Joel Schumacher), even "Rent." It's not going to happen if Hollywood only wants to churn out blockbusters and Oscar machines and makes no place for simpler musicals in contemporary dress and settings. It's not going to happen if Hollywood isn't willing to consider ways of making use of the new musical and comic talent around, or the unused talents of the stars who've been around for a while.

There is one way, however, that Hollywood might follow Broadway's lead, and that's in revivals. Some of our best stage musicals, like "Guys and Dolls" and "Pal Joey," were mucked up on the screen. Some, like George Cukor's film of "My Fair Lady" (a not very good movie for which I admit a lot of affection), were stiff and processed. The studios don't have to look far to see that audiences are flocking to revivals. (The 1996 revival of "Chicago" got its start in the Encores! series at New York's City Center, in which neglected musicals are given staged readings.)

The backlog of great American musicals should be catnip to all the filmmakers and stars who look at "Chicago" and want to do their own musical. If Marshall can score a success without having to soften the material or dumb it down, if he can score a success by getting it right, there should be fewer obstacles to the people who follow in his footsteps. "Chicago" suggests that the still uncertain future of the American movie musical is going to be determined by fusing its present with its past.

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