This is not a good film, let’s get that out of the way. It has that awkward air of a lot of lesser films made in the early sound era when technical problems with integrating the sound and the camera hadn’t been solved yet; everything feels a little stagey and claustrophobic. This is, however, an interesting film, especially when you compare it with 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun, the last movie I reviewed here. What’s interesting in that comparison is also a little bit sad; if you watch the films back to back, you can see a culture moving backwards.
One example: Sitting Bull in in Annie Oakley plays a similar kind of exotified role to the one he plays in Annie Get Your Gun, and he's still mostly concerned with the white characters and their happiness. But in the earlier film he is played by an actual Native American actor: Richard Davis Thunderbird, who played Native characters in around twenty films in the 30s and 40s. Annie Get Your Gun’s Sitting Bull is played by J. Carrol Naish, a dark haired white man who seemed to get slotted into “ethnic” roles of all kinds throughout his career. Thunderbird isn’t given a ton to do, but he also isn’t made into a joke. He gets Annie and her boyfriend back together, but he doesn’t bother with fake-sounding Native wisdom for them. He is impressed with Annie, but not with white people in general. He has actual decisions to make, and conflicts, and threats made to his life. Thunderbird had a craggy, intelligent face, perfect for film. One wishes a better career for him.
This more serious treatment of Sitting Bull is indicative of the attitude the film has to the old west in general. Everything is messier, less assured. In 1935 Oakley herself had only been dead about ten years, and everything feels like much more recent history, rather than a sanitized period piece. You get a sense of two worlds coming into conflict; the process of commodifying the west (both the cowboys and the Indians) and selling it as entertainment would be finished by 1950 but the 1935 film shows that process still in motion, still happening in fits and starts. Sitting Bull is a potential money maker as a star of Buffalo Bill’s show, but there are still people who hate him enough to attempt assassination: he hasn’t yet been transformed into an immovable icon of the past. The real west, where a girl like Annie has to hunt game to support her family, meets the west that’s for show in the person of Toby Walker, an eastern city man who’s just really good at shooting. This tension, between east and west, between authenticity and showmanship, isn’t expertly conveyed, but it’s clearly there, and it’s clearly central.
This means that the plot of the film isn’t about Annie learning to be a wife, as it is in the musical; it’s about her learning to be a star. As in the later film, Annie throws a competition with her boyfriend and lets him win; crucially, this happens at the very beginning of the film when she’s just a girl with a crush, rather than at the end when she wants to prove her loyalty to win him back. In this film her loss doesn’t fool anyone; everyone knows she’s a better shot, and she never hides it again. What Toby has to teach her is style, how to make her skill look interesting to a crowd. They have a partnership; though tensions develop as her career blossoms and his declines, she never considers leaving her career.
Annie wins, in the end, and wins on her own terms: she gets to be and stay a star, and she gets the guy. He’s the one who has to get over being second best, not her. The film gives him an injury which Oakley’s real husband did not have; the film is not so feminist that it will allow the man to be weaker than his wife without an excuse. But it does allow him to be weaker, for him to learn to be content with his role as the supporter to her stardom. This film also makes an interesting companion piece to A Star is Born; it’s a happier version of it, the one that should have happened, that could have happened with a little emotional maturity on the man’s part. Ironic, considering A Star is Born was based on Barbara Stanwyck’s own miserable first marriage; her husband Frank Fay was never happy supporting her.
Stanny is wonderful in this film, as she always was, and she may be the only thing that elevates it above “interesting” into genuinely entertaining. She’s sharp and she’s scared, tough and tender; there’s a warmth and sweetness to her that never fades even when you’re sure she could take just about anybody in a fight. You root for this Annie, and you understand why other people do too. She seems much younger than the 28 she was when the movie was made, which is especially notable when you consider that she was mostly known at this point for playing world-weary, smart girls who grew up tough. This role show’s Stanwyck’s range: Annie is tough, but she’s innocent. This is a coming of age film as much as it’s a romance.
This is worth seeing if you’re a Barbara Stanwyck fan, as I am: it’s why I got the DVD in the first place. If you’re interested in changing portrayals of the American west, it’s also pretty interesting. One wonders what this cast could have done with a better script and modern tech and a real budget; by the time those were on offer, the culture had shifted such that the 1950 musical was what studios wanted to make. It’s too bad.