Old Yorker

  • Annie Get Your Gun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Anna Karenina (1948)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Julien Duvivier (1948)

    The running time in the BFI programme was ‘to be confirmed’; the film they showed ran 111 minutes.  It seems the print available was only recently unearthed and is half an hour short of the full movie:  Wikipedia and IMDB agree that the original lasted 139 minutes.  Perhaps as a result, a few things barely make sense.   Michael Gough (in his cinema debut) is very striking as Konstantin Levin’s elder brother Nikolai but, as he’s on screen for around ten seconds and a couple of lines, it’s not clear who he is:  he might as well just be one of the other workers on his brother’s land.  The latter’s political idealism hardly registers at all.  Even though a few days’ separation from her son Sergei is the reason for the heroine’s sad expression when we first see her face through the window of the train travelling from St Petersburg to Moscow, there’s not enough of Anna and Sergei to allow a viewer to understand how terrible it is for her to lose the boy to her husband when their marriage perishes.   These important omissions make the length of time devoted to Anna’s sojourn in Venice with Vronsky all the more surprising, though the Venetian scenes are well enough done.  But Julien Duvivier’s adaptation of Tolstoy – with a screenplay credited to himself, Jean Anouilh and Guy Morgan – is strong in conveying Anna’s inescapable passion for Vronsky and the inexorable closing off of the possibilities open to her.  The picture’s odd rhythm in its second half may partly be the result of clumsy excisions but it actually helps to get across a sense of Anna’s life going round in ever-decreasing circles.

    The shocking deaths of the novel are all interestingly translated to the screen.  The accident in which a railway worker falls under a train on Anna’s arrival in Moscow happens matter-of-factly – but in a way that you can’t get out of your head.  It really does seem to be the bad omen that Anna feels it be, and to presage her own end:  that too is impressive, although of course more fully dramatised.  In the cavalry officers’ steeplechase, in which Vronsky’s mare Frou-Frou is fatally injured, Duvivier concentrates on the spectators rather than the participants and this works well – Karenin’s determination to have the last word, in spite of his wife’s socially embarrassing preoccupation with Vronsky’s state of health after his horse has come down, has particular impact.   Anna’s own humiliation at the opera in St Petersburg is also effectively done because the rejection by her social peers doesn’t take the form of serial cold shoulders but is focused on the couple in the neighbouring box – the husband talks to Anna at first and is then warned off by his wife.  A seance at which Countess Betsy Tversky presides is very well staged:  Duvivier juxtaposes the conversation among those at the table (and with the spirits) with what’s going on in the background between Anna and Vronsky – under what they assume to be cover of darkness but which the arriving Karenin can make out, as his eyes adjust to the lack of light in the room.

    At first, it’s almost odd to hear Vivien Leigh with an English accent – it’s certainly a reminder that you think of her as Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche Dubois.  Leigh’s playing of Anna may seem a little unvarying (particularly in the light of seeing her Scarlett, as I did, less than twenty-four hours later) but her characterisation has depth and she’s very convincing as someone who, from an early stage in the relationship with Vronsky, simply has no choice.  Ralph Richardson makes a brilliant entrance as Karenin, meeting Anna on her return from Moscow.  As Karenin first registers the threat of Vronsky, there’s a sudden look of true devastation in Richardson’s eyes – which is quickly absorbed as Karenin resolves to ignore it.   Well aware that he bores his wife, Richardson’s Karenin is always determined to use his rectitude to justify himself and to keep the hurt Anna is causing him at bay.  Kieron Moore’s Vronsky is relatively very weak and his accent bizarre – was he trying to disguise his Irishness?   The effect is of someone trying to do an accent but not a particular accent and it makes no sense as virtually everyone else is RP English.  Still, at least there’s an initial connection between Anna and Vronsky and, because Moore cuts a good enough figure in military uniform, he looks reduced in civvies, once Anna and Vronsky are living together, which seems right.  It’s a pity that Hugh Dempster as Oblonsky and Niall MacGinnis as Levin look confusingly similar – like brothers rather than friends – because both are otherwise good; so is Martita Hunt as Countess Betsy.  Although Sally Ann Howes is samey as Kitty and a few of the other performers are a bit awkward, the posh vowel sounds that are so often a problem in English films of the period are fine here, in the high society of Moscow and St Petersburg.   Duvivier’s descriptions of social and household ritual are remarkably fresh, visually fluid and dynamic.  The score by Constant Lambert is strong too and intelligently rationed.   As a whole, the film isn’t cushioned by melodramatic conventions to assure the audience that it’s only a story – perhaps a main reason why it was a commercial failure.

    22 November 2013

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