George Sidney (1950)
One interesting thing about Annie Get Your Gun that I didn’t know is that the sharpshooter Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler were real people (both died in 1926). The TCM piece in the BFI programme note about the troubled history of this film’s production was interesting too but what ended up on the screen is gruesome. George Sidney was the third director on the project, after Arthur Freed had parted company with Busby Berkeley and then Charles Walters. Perhaps Freed should have kept on firing – the film is visually clumsy and, although it’s clearly meant to be bursting with life, oppressively constricted in the way it looks and moves. The screenplay by Sidney Sheldon derives from the book of the stage musical by Dorothy and Herbert Fields, and there are plenty of terrific, imperishable Irving Berlin melodies. When the songs are as good as this, you feel there’s always hope watching a musical: no matter how ropy the bits in between may be, another classic number can’t be far away. But Sidney’s staging means that, as I watched ‘The Girl That I Marry’ or ‘You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun’ or ‘I’m An Indian, Too’ or ‘’My Defences Are Down’ or ‘I Got the Sun in the Morning’ – I kept thinking I’d rather close my eyes and listen to the soundtrack. At least the final musical highlight – the ‘Anything You Can Do’ duet – is the best in the film.
Betty Hutton plays Annie as if her life depended on it – which, in terms of her film career, it unfortunately did. Reading about the making of the film, you can understand her anxiety to impress but the audience and the actress are both soon feeling the strain of her exhausting performance. Her opening number, ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly’, certainly makes an impression: you can see every bit of hard work that’s going into Hutton’s full-on singing and comedy movement and you shrink from it. After Annie joins Buffalo Bill’s travelling show and her tomboyishness has been toned down, Hutton too relaxes a little – but not enough. Her lack of nuance epitomises the forced high spirits of the film as a whole. Once you know the role was meant for Judy Garland, you can’t help imagining her on screen instead. She would probably have made matters better and worse. Betty Hutton is occasionally very touching when she seems to let go and Annie’s vulnerable side come through. For the most part, though, she has to make such efforts to get emotional life into her singing that you long for Garland doin’ what came naturally to her (even – or perhaps especially – when the number was an upbeat one). On the other hand, Hutton is convincing handling a gun; I couldn’t, remembering one of the few enjoyable bits of The Harvey Girls, imagine Garland convincing us she could beat Howard Keel’s Frank Butler at his own game. In his first major screen role, Keel is in fine voice and his easy playing comes as a relief. The supporting cast includes Louis Calhern as Buffalo Biill, J Carrol Naish as Chief Sitting Bull and (the best of them) Keenan Wynn as Charlie Davenport, one of the managers of the Wild West Show.
When Keel, Calhern and Wynn start singing ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, the number repeatedly seems about to take off before Annie gets in the way. It was here that I was most conscious of the frustrating lack of dancing in the film: the choreography is largely non-human. The final composition of horses and riders is equine Busby Berkeley and has a slightly surreal quality: cowboys and Indians and their mounts doing dressage moves. Elsewhere, they are moving at speed: I guess that replacing dance numbers in a musical with staple elements of a Western was part of what got on my nerves so much. And although I know it’ll sound pompous to say this, I find the way the Native Americans are presented here – their essential sinisterness made fun of by turning them comical – hard to take. The fact that it may be historically accurate in more ways than one doesn’t make it any more palatable. Not for the first time, it made me think that American Indians are usually portrayed on screen as if that’s the only world in which (unlike African Americans) they ever actually existed: their being part of the cast of Buffalo Bill’s travelling show in Annie Get Your Gun underlines the point.
20 December 2011
