OVP: Annie Get Your Gun (1950)

Film: Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
Stars: Betty Hutton, Howard Keel, Louis Calhern, J. Carrol Naish
Director: George Sidney
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 wins (Best Music Scoring*, Editing, Cinematography, Art Direction)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

It's not often that you get to see a truly classic musical for the first time, but this morning I got to do just that.  Annie Get Your Gun, one of the quintessential Irving Berlin musicals, has been performed on stage and screen several times, but never quite like this, with Betty Hutton giving the greatest performance of her career.  Hutton, at the time a major star for Paramount, was loaned out to MGM when Judy Garland's personal demons caused her not to be able to complete production on the film (Hutton, of course, would go on to have her own severe personal demons, eventually losing all of her money and becoming an addict and having to become a cook in a rectory to pay her bills-seriously, where's that biopic, and can we cast Laura Bell Bundy in it?).  This resulted in a major moment in her career, and within a couple of years she'd be headlining another Oscar-winning film, Best Picture victor The Greatest Show on Earth.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like Mitzi Gaynor earlier this week, I wasn't particularly familiar with Ms. Hutton, but count me as a major fan after this particular picture.  Annie Get Your Gun may have a few dated moments (particularly it's treatment of Native Americans and the ending, where Annie has to get her man by letting him win a shooting contest), but as a whole it's absolute bliss.  The film, for those unfamiliar with the musical, recalls Annie Oakley's (Hutton) rise to stardom (though a healthy amount of liberties are taken with her life's story), joining the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to follow fellow sharpshooter Frank Butler (Keel) around in hopes that he'll fall head-over-heels for her.  He does, of course, but in the process of her joining she overtakes him as the star of the Wild West Show, and he joins a rival show in protest.  Oakley spends a good chunk of the final half of the film trying to get him back while protesting that she doesn't care what he does, and eventually they both come to their senses, but not before hilariously singing the classic "Anything You Can Do."

The film is at its best whenever Hutton is at the center of a scene, and thankfully that's basically the whole movie.  Hutton's vocal prowess rivals that of Ethel Merman (who originated the role of Annie on Broadway), blasting through her songs like a perky stick of dynamite.  I particularly loved her rendition of "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun," which showed both a strong adherence to her character as well as some clever use of her rough-and-tumble persona with the sharp lyrics.  Really, though, you could basically go with any of these numbers and you'd be in for a treat-this is a wonderful musical comedy performance, and while the Best Actress race of 1950 was particularly marvelous (Davis, Swanson, and Holliday, oh my!), it's a pity that Hutton, who got a Globe nod for this piece, couldn't have grabbed a citation for her work here.

The film did, of course, nab four Oscar nominations, though not all of them were quite as deserving as the others.  The Scoring of the film is terrific-George Sidney's expansion of the play, taking advantage of larger sets to stage more elaborate musical numbers pays off with the film not feeling like it was clearly on Broadway first, and as a result we get a finer use of the screen to capture the numbers.  The cinematography is good, though occasionally disjointed; there are moments in the film that clearly feel like we've entered Gone with the Wind territory, with the sudden shadows and incredible sunsets, but there's no such variance when we get back to the "always sunny" daytime scenes.  The Art Direction is equally hit-or-miss, with the opening number actually feeling like a real, expansive set (I loved the entire aspect of the hotel and how the camera took advantage of a somewhat circular lot (perhaps I should add another point to the cinematographer for that scene)), but later scenes don't quite have the same lived-in, reality-esque feel.  The least of the four nominations would surely be the editing, as not only do a couple of skips happen between the sound and the singers (critical for editing a musical), but there is nothing particularly engaging about the shifts between scenes.

Those are my thoughts on this film, which is truly a must-see musical and if you like classic Hollywood at all you should catch it post haste, but I want to know yours.  Unlike most of the obscure TCM films that I review on the blog, this is one that I suspect a few of you have seen, so what'd you think?  Are you as equally as smitten as I with Betty Hutton?  Did you know she ended up having such a hard-knock life?  And what are your thoughts on the four Oscar nominations (and one win) earned by the picture?  Share in the comments!