Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/10/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, July 10, 2020

Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953)

Allyn Ann McLerie and Doris Day in Calamity Jane

Cast: Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn Ann McLerie, Philip Carey, Dick Wesson, Paul Harvey, Chubby Johnson, Gale Robbins. Screenplay: James O'Hanlon. Cinematography: Wilfrid M. Cline. Art direction: John Beckman. Film editing: Irene Morra. Songs: Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster.

Doris Day sets some people's teeth on edge, and I have to admit that when she's butching it up in Calamity Jane, she sometimes gets on my nerves a bit. But mostly I'm a fan: She had real cinematic presence, good comedy timing, and one of the sweetest singing voices of any star, with an ability to put a song over. I wish that she had been cast as Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950) instead of the bumptious, brassy Betty Hutton, or as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958) instead of the blandly perky Mitzi Gaynor. But instead we have a string of somewhat undistinguished Warner Bros. musicals, culminating in Calamity Jane, which is an almost unabashed rip-off of Annie Get Your Gun, down to the casting of Howard Keel, who was Frank Butler in the 1950 film. Keel as Wild Bill Hickok and Day as Jane even get an insult-trading duet, "I Can Do Without You," that recalls "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" from the Irving Berlin musical. The Sammy Fain-Paul Francis Webster song score for Calamity Jane is of course nowhere near the equal of Berlin's, with only the Oscar-winning "Secret Love" lingering in anyone's memory, and that perhaps mostly because it has been adopted as a kind of LGBTQ anthem. The film itself has attracted a lot of attention because of its supposed queerness: It has a drag number, performed by Dick Wesson as the hapless Easterner who has been hired as a performer because his name, Francis, made the saloon owner think he was a woman, but most of the comment has been about the relationship between Jane and Katie Brown (Allyn Ann McLerie), who set up house together in a montage to the tune of "A Woman's Touch." Subtext aside, the movie is lively and energetic, and Day works her ass off in the role. Still, if you want a taste of what could have been, seek out the recording of Annie Get Your Gun that Day made with Robert Goulet as Hickok.