Annie Get Your Gun **** (1950, Betty Hutton, Howard Keel, Louis Calhern) – Classic Movie Review 2618

The MGM studio, home of the musical, surprisingly lets down Irving Berlin’s great theatre show in a stagey, low-pizzazz movie version with the wrong star. However, director George Sidney’s 1950 movie is all very bright, flashy and entertaining anyway.

But, with a series of 10 fantastic showstopper numbers like ‘You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun’, ‘I’ve Got the Sun in the Morning’, ‘The Girl That I Marry’, ‘Colonel Buffalo Bill’, ‘Anything, You Can Do’, ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’, ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’ly’, ‘My Defences Are Down’, ‘I’m an Indian Too’, and the haunting ‘They Say It’s Wonderful’, it should be a five-star movie.

Nevertheless, it was huge hit though: on a $3,768,785 budget, it took $8,000,000 at the US box office. It won an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture (for Adolph Deutsch and Roger Edens). Screenwriter Sidney Sheldon won the 1951 Writers Guild of America award for Best Written American Musical. Charles Rosher was Oscar nominated for Best Cinematography Colour and there was another nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration Colour.

Judy Garland, who would have been perfect as the young Western sharpshooter Annie Oakley, collapsed and was replaced by a fizzy but irritating Betty Hutton. (Nevertheless, she won the Photoplay Award for Most Popular Female Star.) Why didn’t they cast Ethel Merman – the original stage star whom Berlin wrote the show for in the first place – or Doris Day?

That leaves an ideal Howard Keel to take the bulk of the applause as Frank Butler, the Wild West show shooting-partner Annie falls for, although Edward Arnold, Keenan Wynn, J Carrol Naish and Louis Calhern also score as Pawnee Bill, Charlie Davenport, Chief Sitting Bull and Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody. In the story Annie meets Frank Butler at a shooting match and joins him in Colonel Cody’s Wild West Show, touring the world. It is only very loosely fact based on the couple’s love story, using not much more than the real-life characters.

It was a seriously troubled production: apart from losing Judy Garland, the film also lost two directors (Busby Berkeley, Charles Walters), while Frank Morgan, cast as Buffalo Bill, died suddenly and Calhern reshot his scenes. That’s Entertainment 3 contains a valuable, teasing fragment of Garland’s exciting performance.

The DVD offers precious outtake numbers: Hutton singing ‘Let’s Go West Again’, Garland performing ‘Doin’ What Comes Natur’ly’ and I’m an Indian Too’, and Morgan doing ‘Colonel Buffalo Bill’.

Also in the cast are Benay Venuta, Clinton Sundberg, James H Harrison, Bradley Mora, Susan Odin, Diane Dick, Eleanor Brown, Evelyn Beresford and André Charlot.

Merman eventually got to sing ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ on film, in the 1954 movie of the same name. She was brilliant.

For another version of the story see Annie Oakley (1935) with Barbara Stanwyck.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2618

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