More on AGYG

Another blogger left a comment about Annie Get Your Gun a couple of days ago, saying that it was originally made in black and white and that people don't watch b&w movies and thus miss out on many good films.
Well, I don't have any doubt that AGYG was made in colour, not b&w. It has no hint of being a 'coloured' movie. And I've watched black and white movies as often as colour. It's only in the last few years, however, that b&w has come back into its own. And, thank goodness, the idea of colouring movies has gone out the window pretty much. It was always an awful approach, and seldom truly successful.
Another blogger informed me that there's a huge website devoted to Judy Garland, called The Judy Garland Experience. Seems that everything you ever wanted to know about Garland is available on this site - I'm still to check it out - and there are people writing on it who actually knew her well.
It's a great experience to watch Garland in a musical. There's such life in everything she does - and she not only had a unique voice, she had a unique way of expressing herself as a person. The tragedy of her life won't be forgotten in a hurry, but the legacy of her movies will eventually overshadow it, I think.

Annie Gets Her Gun Again

Watched Annie Get Your Gun on DVD last night....it was the first time I'd seen it since the movie came out around 1950. (When I was a little lad.) One of the reasons it's been invisible, apparently, is that the film has been the subject of some dispute between Irving Berlin's estate and the film company.
It's a great DVD transfer: the colour is excellent, and the copy is very clean. The music has survived untainted, from the sensuous songs, The girl that I marry, and, They say that falling in love is wonderful, to the full-on-vocal-argument: Anything you can do I can do better, which is performed with such energy you wonder the two of them make it right through. The two of them being Betty Hutton (a replacement for Judy Garland, who took ill) and Howard Keel (who looks as though he was never ill). Hutton is full in your face - well, mostly in Keel's face - but you still wish that they'd made the movie when Ethel Merman was young enough to still do the part on screen. What a loss not to have a record of her performance in the part. You can't quite imagine her hopping around the stage with a rifle swinging, but nevertheless....
The music is what holds the piece together: the storyline is pretty thin, although the cast do their utmost to make sure we don't notice. But the male chauvinism of Frank Butler (I was almost going to write Rhett Butler) is never addressed; in fact, he's given leeway to maintain his arrogant male attitude because Annie lets him in the end, in order that they get together. You don't imagine it would be much of a marriage though; eventually she'd sock him one because he was so thick-skinned. Even Keel can't do much with a character who one minute is all gooey-eyed over Hutton and the next mostly gooey-eyed over himself.

And then there are the Indians. Shuffled around the background of the movie until Chief Sitting Bull makes an appearance, and even then mostly treated as bullet fodder. Sitting Bull at least is given some wisdom stuff to spout, and pulls the end of the story together, but his Sioux tribe are a pretty odd lot when they get a-dancing...! Supposedly Busby Berkeley was due to direct at one point; it's probably just as well he didn't. Whoever did the choreography wasn't much into Indian dancing, I suspect. These guys are a bunch of clowns without being funny.