How did Velma's gun get bloody?
- A gun by its very nature is a ranged distance, as evidenced later in the film when Lucy Liu as Go To Hell Kitty demonstrates. So how come Velma's introduction shows her not only with bloody hands, but also a bloody gun wrapped up in a handkerchief (or piece of lingerie).
- She might have shot him from close range.
- Or she might have handled the bodies, perhaps to conceal them after the murder, then transferred blood to the gun when she picked it up again.
- She might have been mad enough to pistol whip
Is this musical Diegetic or non-diegetic?
- The majority of the numbers happen in Roxie's head as a stage number, but there are some, like Velma's opening number, that happen in real life, and Nowadays/Hot Honey Rag that we can't be certain are real or fantasy. so which structure does this film fall in to?
- "All That Jazz" is definitely diegetic, while most of the others are just in Roxie's head. The last one is a bit ambiguous, where it could be Roxie imagining her and Velma finding success or it actually happening.
- A different idea: The entire show is Velma and Roxie's vaudeville act. This would explain the MC, the band leader, and the soliloquies.
- With regard to the film, it's generally accepted that 'All That Jazz' and 'Nowadays' are the only diegetic songs (they're the only ones with very little to no stylism in the filming/editing since they don't keep cutting back to "real life"). All the others are non-diegetic. In the stage version, it's much more vague. Also, in general it's actually much rarer than you might think to find a musical that's completely one or the other. Most will have diegetic and non-diegetic songs in them somewhere...
How did Billy get Roxie's diary without her noticing?
- How did Billy get at Roxie's diary, write in it, then leave it as a parcel for Mama Morton without Roxie knowing? I can buy him picking the lock and faking her handwriting pretty easy, and I can buy Roxie letting him look through it in their meetings but she'd have to give it to him for that, and I can't see her leaving it with him since she didn't question the idea of Velma getting it from her cell.
- Roxie is showing writing in her diary when she's at the height of her fame and ego. But after Katalin's execution, she gets a lot more serious about her situation, and probably stopped regularly boasting to herself in her diary. If that's the case, it would be plausible for her not to notice it was missing because she wasn't writing in it regularly anymore.
- Billy may have told Mama that he needed Roxie's diary and asked her to get it to him without Roxie knowing. Then he wrote in it and gave it back to Mama, who passed it on to Velma. It would have been easy for Mama to get hold of it, and she seemed to know that at least something was up when she gave it to Velma.
Wouldn't some of the Merry Muderesses' defenses have been legitimate?
- It would seem that Velma could have pled 'temporary insanity' to get off—finding her husband and her sister in bed together and shooting them on the spot would seem to qualify. Not to mention a great deal of public sympathy. One would think the DA would rather have that plea deal as opposed to prosecuting a popular performer who was done wrong by her husband and sister.
- Murderess 3 ("Squish") could also have pled self-defense. If her husband was attacking her, she could claim she panicked and just kept stabbing at him until she realized he wasn't coming after her any more.
