Gaily, Gaily

Gaily, Gaily (1969)

The movie of a 19-year-old who went to town-- who went to TOWN!

After runaway Ben Young is robbed and left on his own, he is taken in by Lil, the head of a Chicago brothel. Acting as a surrogate mother for Ben, who thinks she runs a boardinghouse, Lil gets him a job with Francis Sullivan at the local newspaper. As Ben is exposed to the workings of the big city, he realizes the extent of government corruption and sets out on the daunting task of reforming Chicago politics, finding several allies along the way.

Date of release
1969-12-16
TMDB
4.3 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 47m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Norman Jewison

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 3

Gaily, Gaily is a 1969 American comedy film directed by Norman Jewison. It is a fictionalized adaptation of a 1963 memoir of the same name by Ben Hecht and stars Beau Bridges, Brian Keith, George Kennedy, Hume Cronyn and Melina Mercouri.

Production

For the past ten days, Jewison and a large camera crew have been shooting the Chicago Hecht, must have known: the B&O station, Lincoln Park, streets on the Near North Side, and the Auditorium Theater....This week, the company moves to Milwaukee. “They have streets there that still look more like Chicago than anything left here,” Jewison said.

Director Norman Jewison wanted to film on location in Chicago, but found the city too modern for the film's setting: "Chicago has some nice, old streets, but behind every one of them there’s a 70 story skyscraper," he said. Exteriors instead were shot in Milwaukee, where modern skyscrapers were less prevalent, during June and July 1968.

The North American title comes from a poem by the Canadian poet, Bliss Carman: "Oh but life went gayly, gayly,/In the house of Idiedaily!/There were always throats to sing/Down the riverbanks with spring."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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