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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative
90.3  
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December, 2003
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Movie Reviews



Chicago: City of the Century. Prod. by Austin Hoyt. WGBH Boston and WTTW Chicago in association with the Chicago Historical Society for American Experience, 2003. 270 mins. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698; 800-344-3337; <shop@ pbs.org>; <http://shop.pbs.org/education/> [Sept. 15, 2003])

Chicago: City of the Century, is a four-and-a-half-hour-long offering in the heroic urban biography mode, with a good dose of muck-raking. The dramatic arc of the three episodes—"Mud Hole to Metropolis," "The Revolution Has Begun," and "Battle for Chicago"—links Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet's "discovery" of the site to the city's meteoric nineteenth-century growth, destruction, and rebirth, culminating in the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and its demolition by arson the following year. 1
      Based on the historian Donald L. Miller's City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (1996), the documentary draws on the resources of many archival repositories, employing the established visual repertoire of historical images, film clips, and reenactments. Its exceptional feature is brilliant computer animation of the geographic evolution of ethnic neighborhoods and the spread of the Chicago fire of 1871. The on-camera commentators are an appropriate assemblage of academics, writers, and Chicago aficionados, speaking in a rich variety of local accents. For persons whose primary association with the name "Chicago" is either "gangster" or "Mayor Daley," this documentary will supply many missing pieces. . . .

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