My review of The Widow from Chicago is still coming, I promise. I was doing some background research on the movie yesterday and came across a couple of Alice White clippings in the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle that won’t really fit that post, so here they are.
White was still huge that year at First National, in fact, The Widow from Chicago was all along an Alice White-picture, not an Edward G. Robinson-picture. Not until it released at least. By that time the studio had decided not to pick up Alice’s contract and thus ended Alice White’s time of major stardom. (More of Alice’s rise and fall in this post from my archives). And it turned out that Robinson guy made for a pretty good hood.
Anyway, the bug-eyed caricature of Alice at the top right (I think the artist’s signature says “French”) was published in January 1930 in promotion of The Girl from Woolworth’s (1929). The Old Gold cigarette ad featuring Alice below (and you can click it to enlarge) covered the bottom half of a page in the Eagle that August 4. By the time The Widow from Chicago was released late that year, First National was billing her in small letters under Robinson and Neil Hamilton. They were done with her.
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