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The easeful procession of vaudeville gags declares its tomboyish bent early on with a blithe wisecracker (Pert Kelton) invading the saloon. (A couple of graybeards storm out, "nothing's sacred anymore!") Barbara Stanwyck's Annie Oakley is a humble backwoods huntress "who can knock the eye out of a bumblebee," her sharpshooting lands her next to the tall-talking marksman (Preston Foster) in Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders tour. She misses the target on purpose to spare his ego, he returns the favor by teaching her about razzmatazz. Sitting Bull (Chief Thunderbird) in the audience is unimpressed until the newcomer takes center stage, during a reenactment with covered wagons he leaps into the arena with scalping knife in hand. "Not bad for a paleface." George Stevens amply appreciates the carnival synergy between performers and viewers, a benevolent tin-horn community that accommodates a Buffalo Bill (Moroni Olsen) who's rather wary of jokes about his tresses. The blend of comic and meticulous is gently epitomized in the company portrait—everybody poses in tableau vivant as the camera travels across the panorama and the photographer savors a cold beer, a fly on the nose threatens to unsettle the composition. The perfumed cowboy ahead of My Darling Clementine, Laurel and Hardy double-takes for the august brave, much groundwork for A Star Is Born. Above all, rousing views of the barnstorming young Stanwyck outrunning and outmaneuvering the fellers around her, "Miss Hickory Nut Knocker." Sidney at MGM turns the soft-shoe into a pinwheeling hoedown (Annie Get Your Gun), Altman four decades later has it as a death march (Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson). With Melvyn Douglas, Andy Clyde, Dick Elliott, and Margaret Armstrong. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |