Review of In Old Chicago

Many people are more familiar with Gone with the Wind than this movie when it came out 1 year earlier. From seeing this movie, I noticed certain common traits that both movie share. The epic Chicago fire of 1870 is shot on a very large scale with a cast of thousands. It rivals the burning of Atlanta from Gone with the Wind. The movie has a black woman worker for the main female lead in the film similar to Gone with the Wind. And the movie has probably the strongest speech at the end of the movie (by the O'Leary's mother character) that rivals the ending speech from Gone with the Wind. The movie concerns the O'Leary family who move to Chicago in search of new opportunities. A single mother and her three sons live and grow up in the city. One of the sons (Tyrone Power) meets and falls in love with Alice Faye. The plot and storyline of the movie is somewhat weak and could have used some revision to make the movie better. The movie's strong points are the shots of the Chicago streets, the staging of the Great Fire, and the large cow stampede scenes. This is one of the earlier disaster movie themes that took quite a lot of cast members and staging in order to execute the overall disaster event.