The Blues Brothers (Chicago)

Why is The Blues Brothers the greatest Chicago movie? Not because it’s a great movie. The plot makes no sense — religious orphanages don’t pay taxes — and its quotable moments (“I hate Illinois Nazis”) are interspersed with slooow-paced scenes that show Dan Aykroyd was more adept at sketch comedy than screenwriting. The Blues Brothers is the greatest Chicago movie because it displays a particular Chicago, now long gone: the gritty industrial metropolis that looked like it was headed toward the same post-industrial ash heap as Detroit and Cleveland, just before the yuppie makeover reflected in About Last Night and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. As that Chicago recedes into time, the movie’s historical value grows.

The film’s opening sequence, as the Bluesmobile navigates industrial South Chicago, is a montage of railroad bridges, fish shacks, run-down two flats, and the smoking, flaming U.S. Steel South Works, which once employed 20,000, but would be gone by decade’s end. Elwood (Aykroyd) demonstrates the car’s class by jumping it over the 95th Street bridge, which is open to make way for a freighter, probably carrying iron ore to a mill up the Calumet River. Wisconsin Steel closed the year The Blues Brothers was released, putting 3,400 steelworkers on the unemployment line. Elwood lives in an L-side flophouse in the Loop, then a seedy, windblown district of gin mills and grind houses where no respectable Illinoisan set foot after five o’clock.

The Blues Brothers reintroduced Chicago to moviegoers. Mayor Richard J. Daley discouraged filmmaking here after the police drama M Squad aired an episode about a corrupt police officer. Mayor Jane Byrne welcomed it. Before filming began, actor John Belushi met with Byrne to ask permission to shoot a large-scale Hollywood movie in Chicago. He offered to donate $200,000 to local orphanages, but what really seemed to sell Byrne was the proposal to drive the Bluesmobile through the Daley Center, named for the family of her political enemies. Do whatever you want, Byrne told Belushi. Just clean up afterwards. Chicago was back on the cinematic map, and the multiplex of movies that followed — Risky Business, The Color of Money, Running Scared, The Untouchables — helped transform the city into the cultural capital it is today.

Trespass (East St. Louis)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre comes to Metro East. Vince (William Sadler) and Don (Bill Paxton), two firefighters from Fort Smith, Ark., go out on a call and hear the confession of a dying man who robbed a Catholic church 50 years before and hid the gold statuary in an East St. Louis factory, for which he provides a treasure map. The factory was long ago abandoned to derelicts and drug dealers, as the country boys discover when they start rooting around with a metal detector and a crow bar. The ruins are the turf of drug dealer King James (Ice-T), who uses the place to perform executions and dump bodies. Alarmed and confused by a couple white guys who don’t seem to be cops, King James calls out his henchmen — who definitely don’t need no stinking badges — forcing Vince and Don to choose between their loot and their lives.

Trespass was actually filmed in Atlanta, at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, which shut down during the 1970s — the older cities of the South are just as rusty as the Midwest. Beyond its inventive use of a factory for a story of buried treasure and gunfights, Trespass is a piercing look at the gang culture of the early 1990s, when the Crack Wars drove big-city murder rates to all-time highs. It’s better than New Jack City, because the gangbangers are characters in an action drama with no good guys or bad guys, rather than villains presented for our disapproval. The casting of gangsta rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube is also shrewd. The battle for gold between thugs and rednecks gives the movie an opportunity to express the racial estrangement of that era — 1992 was also the year of Malcolm X and the Los Angeles riots. When Vince and Don capture a derelict living in the plant, Vince complains that he needs the gold because of “taxes that get higher every year so that people like him can keep eatin’ without doing any work.” And when they capture King James’s brother, Lucky (De’voreaux White), he tells them, “the only time you white boys ever come down here is to rip us off.”

The Informant! (Decatur)

I’m trying to imagine the conversation in which Steven Soderbergh talked Matt Damon into starring in The Informant!: “Matt, we had a big hit with Ocean’s Eleven. Now let’s do a movie based on an investigative reporter’s book about price fixing in the lysine industry. Last time, we filmed in Vegas. This time, we’ll film in Downstate Illinois.”

Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an executive at Archer Daniels Midland, the food processor headquartered in Decatur. In the early 1990s, Whitacre acted as an FBI mole, exposing an international conspiracy to fix the price of lysine, an additive used in livestock feed. At the same time, he was embezzling $9 million from ADM, a crime for which he served eight-and-a-half years in federal prison.

Inexplicably, The Informant! was filmed as a comedy, with a zany piano score by Marvin Hamlisch. That was, it seems, the only way to make lysine price-fixing sexy. Damon gained 30 pounds and wore a toupee to play the bumbling Whitacre. I was working at the newspaper in Decatur when Whitacre’s crimes were exposed, so I recognized some of the people and places in the movie. Damon meets with FBI agents at the Chinese Tea Garden, a classic Chinese restaurant downtown. One of my old colleagues, Tim Cain, has a line as a reporter at a press conference outside Whitacre’s house in Moweaqua. If you’ve always wanted to see Central Illinois on film, The Informant! is your movie.

Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling (Peoria)

Richard Pryor’s autobiographical film begins with a stand-up comedian in the hospital, recovering from burns suffered while freebasing cocaine. As he lies in a coma, Jo Jo Dancer’s Alter Ego relives his life, beginning with his childhood in Peoria, where he grew up in his grandmother’s brothel. In one early scene, little Jo Jo runs home from school, just in time to see a whore throwing out a john who asked her to piss on him. 

Like most artists, Pryor had a complicated relationship with his hometown. When a Peoria Journal-Star columnist asked Pryor if he had any advice for the newspaper’s readers, he offered two words: “Get…out.” Yet Jo Jo Dancer, the only movie Pryor directed, was filmed in Peoria, although not in the actual houses where his grandmother did business: those had been demolished to build a bridge across the Illinois River. Peoria also made its peace with its most famous and controversial native, erecting a Richard Pryor statue in 2015, a decade after the comedian’s death. The Richard Pryor’s Peoria website is a tour of the town that inspired his comedy.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois (Springfield)

Daniel Day-Lewis may have acted and sounded more like Abraham Lincoln than any actor who played the 16th president. That’s why he won an Oscar. But no actor ever looked more like Lincoln than Raymond Massey. It’s hard to find anyone so homely in Hollywood.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois is based on Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, in which Massey starred on Broadway. (Massey became so associated with the role that he began dressing and acting like Lincoln at parties. “Massey won’t be satisfied until someone assassinates him,” playwright George S. Kaufman cracked.) Lincoln arrives in Illinois as a young rustic, farming, flatboating, and postmastering, and leaves 30 years later as president-elect. In between, he runs for the legislature, gets married, and debates Stephen Douglas (Gene Lockhart), who is portrayed as a respected rival, rather than simply a foil for Lincoln’s anti-slavery views. Abe Lincoln in Illinois is not nearly as political as Lincoln.

In fact, the movie is more concerned with Lincoln’s romances than his politics. First, with Ann Rutledge (Mary Howard), an early love who died young of typhoid. Then, with his wife Mary (Ruth Gordon), portrayed as an ambitious tyro pushing the bashful Lincoln to higher and higher offices. Disappointingly for Illinoisans, Abe Lincoln in Illinois was filmed on location in…Eugene, Oregon. That explains the mountains in Sangamon County.

Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (Cave-in-Rock)

Davy Crockett and the River Pirates features the only cinematic depiction of Mike Fink, the semi-legendary Ohio River keelboatman. Fink called himself “the Salt River Roarer.” He bragged “I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot and lick any man in the river. I’m half sea-dog, and the rest of me is Kentucky war horse, Ohio snapping turtle and Mississippi gator. I can shoot a whisker off a sleeping cat at fifty yards without waking him up. I love women and I love a good fight.”

In this 1956 production, originally aired on ABC’s Disneyland program, Davy (Fess Parker) and his sidekick George (a proto-Jed Clampett Buddy Ebsen) team up with Fink (Jeff York) to capture a gang of pirates posing as Kaskaskia Indians. The pirates are led by a freebooter named Samuel Mason, whose hideout was Cave-in-Rock, a deep, low shelter that looked out on the Ohio from the bluffs at the southern tip of the Illinois Territory. Mason enticed boatmen ashore with a sign advertising “Liquor Vault and House of Entertainment.” If that didn’t bring ’em in, Mason dispatched a confederate to pose as a pilot who could guide the boat through the treacherous channel. Instead, the pilot ran it aground near the cave, where Mason and his pirates overwhelmed the gullible crew and looted their cargo.  Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and Samuel Mason were all real-life figures whose deeds have been embellished by dime-store novelists, so Davy Crockett and the River Pirates is an entertaining blend of Americana and folklore. Most importantly, for the purposes of this list, it was actually filmed on the Ohio River, at Cave-in-Rock, which is now a state park.

Risky Business (Highland Park)

His name is Joel Goodsen. He deals in human fulfillment. Risky Business was the movie that made Tom Cruise a star. When he danced to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll” in his underwear, that was it. It was also the movie that started the trend of 1980s teen comedies set in the Chicago suburbs — a year ahead of John Hughes’s Sixteen Candles. Writer/director Paul Brickman attended Highland Park High School.

What those suburban teen movies have in common is a preoccupation with social class and status. In Risky Business, the stakes are higher than who’s popular enough to get invited to Stubby’s party. Joel wants to get into Princeton University, his father’s alma mater. An Ivy League degree will allow him to duplicate his parents’ elite North Shore lifestyle. He and his overachieving friends have one goal: “Make money.”

Joel needs money after a hooker named Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) accidentally rolls his father’s Porsche into Belmont Harbor while his parents are out of town. Lana and her colleagues throw a party at Joel’s house to help him pay for repairs. That same night, a Princeton recruiter (Richard Masur) visits, telling Joel that his credentials are “not quite Ivy League.”

“So, how we doin’?” Lana asks after the interview.

“Looks like University of Illinois!” Joel shouts, before flashing a shit eating grin.

(I know U of I grads who hate that scene.)

 Before the recruiter leaves, Lana’s friends entertain him. When Joel’s father returns, he asks his son, “Do you have something to tell me?” It’s not about the car, or the whores. It’s about the recruiter telling him, “Princeton can use a guy like Joel.” Even if Dad had known all, getting into Princeton would have forgiven all.

High Fidelity (Chicago)

High Fidelity came out in 2000, but it’s a ’90s movie, an homage to Wicker Park’s alternative music scene, which was second only to Seattle’s in that decade. Rob Gordon (John Cusack, the most Gen X actor) owns Championship Vinyl, a used record store at Milwaukee and Honore. Rob and his scenester employees, Barry and Dick (Jack Black and Todd Louiso) wish they could be musicians. They can’t, so they settle for judging everyone else’s musical tastes.

The ’90s were a golden decade for Chicago. High Fidelity inspires nostalgia in anyone who lived through those years. Rob makes a mixtape for a music writer from the Chicago Reader, which was still a fat four sections and still the last word on music in Chicago. Barry belts out “Let’s Get It On” at Lounge Ax, which closed in January 2000, two months before the movie opened, truly marking the end of the ’90s in Chicago. Rob is infatuated with singer Marie De Salle (Lisa Bonet). When he plays her CD at the record store, the voice belongs to Edith Frost, who lived in Chicago then.

At the end of the movie, Rob offers to promote a record by a pair of young skate punks who hang out at the store. The message: Gen X aren’t the kids anymore. The ’90s are over.

The Color of Money (Chicago)

I knew a junkie pool hustler named Waterdog who earned $50 a day as an extra in The Color of Money. The producers needed a lot of pool players for the movie’s final scene, the Atlantic City nine-ball tournament, which was filmed at Navy Pier. Despite the windfall, Waterdog didn’t like the movie, especially compared to its predecessor, The Hustler, which had inspired him to take up pool.

“It didn’t have no plot,” he said, and it didn’t help the action, by inspiring moviegoers to take up the game. 

Waterdog did enjoy meeting Paul Newman, who won an Oscar for reprising his role as Fast Eddie Felson, now a washed-up pool shark working as a liquor salesman. Felson acts as a stakehorse for a young hotshot named Vincent (Tom Cruise, who played a lot of young hotshots in the ’80s). Eddie takes Vincent around to all his favorite rooms, including Chris’s Billiards on Milwaukee Avenue, where he beats hustler Grady Seasons. Chris’s is still there, and still commemorates its cinematic moment with movie posters and stills of the stars, forming a rising gallery along the stairwell.

Soul Food (Chicago)

George Tillman Jr., a Columbia College graduate, also directed Barbershop, which some viewers consider the Great South Side movie. I’ve always preferred Soul Food. I sent my mother the single of the film’s theme song — “A Song For Mama,” by Boyz II Men — and she gushed that I was the real gift. Barbershop is a male-dominated movie, but Soul Food celebrates the matriarchal aspects of African-American culture. Big Mama (Irma P. Hall) gathers her family for a soul food dinner every Sunday. Big Mama holds the family together, but she’s afflicted with diabetes. When Big Mama dies after suffering a stroke during an amputation to remove her leg, everyone in the family starts misbehaving. Teri’s cousin seduces Teri’s husband, leading to a divorce. Then Teri (Vanessa Williams) tries to sell the house to pay Big Mama’s hospital bills. Maxine (Vivica A. Fox) and Bird (Nia Long) go to court to stop her. Soon Big Mama’s family isn’t talking, much less sharing Sunday dinners.

Besides the main players, Soul Food features a couple of amusing supporting characters who play on neighborhood stereotypes: skirt-chasing Reverend Williams (Carl Wright), and reclusive Uncle Pete (John M. Watson Sr.), whose emergence from his room helps save the family.