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186 Wild West Stanwyck Annie฀Oakley,฀Union฀Pacific,฀California,฀The฀Furies,฀ The฀Moonlighter,฀Blowing฀Wild,฀Cattle฀Queen฀of฀Montana,฀ The฀Violent฀Men,฀Escape฀to฀Burma,฀The฀Maverick฀Queen,฀ Trooper฀Hook,฀Forty฀Guns When asked about the western, which was probably her favorite genre, Stanwyck sighed happily, “Oh, I love to do them. I just love to do them.” She owned ranches for most of her life and also raced horses. Wide-open spaces agreed with her. “Well, I’m particularly fond of reading about the early West,” she said. “I think it was a very romantic era in our country.” In the heyday of her initial years of stardom, the 1930s, westerns were usually relegated to B and Z picture programmers and were rarely major features, but that started to change in the mid-tolate forties. By the fifties, the western in America was one of the most challenging and complex of film forms. In the hands of directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher , Allan Dwan, André de Toth, and many others, it was characterized by any number of fresh ideas and attitudes, politically, morally, and aesthetically. George Stevens’s version of the early life of Annie฀Oakley฀(1935) is about as sophisticated politically as you can expect from a film of its era. This is a movie that often hints at a more developed content but usually retreats into period charm and the kind of comedy routines that Stevens learned at the Hal Roach studios while photographing the best short subjects of Laurel and Hardy. “No fiction is stranger than the actual life of Annie Oakley who came out of a backwoods village half a century ago to astonish the world,” reads a title after the credits. But the film does indeed fictionalize parts of her story to suit the conventions of the time. w i l d w e s t s ta n w y C k 187 Stanwyck actually does look a lot like photos of the real Annie, who stood barely five feet tall; Stevens makes sure to film her in such a way that she looks small, even dainty, in his over-packed frames. We first see Stanwyck’s Annie riding in a carriage with her mother. “Gosh, ain’t he pretty,” she says softly, looking at a picture of Toby Walker (Preston Foster), a renowned sharpshooter (in real life, Stanwyck had a helpless respect for male beauty). “That’s not for ladies,” says a barkeep to vaudevillian Vera Delmar (Pert Kelton), trying to keep her out of his barroom, but she cracks, “I’m no lady” and barges right in. Stevens does some fast cuts to nonplussed male faces. “Next thing you know, they’ll be smoking cigarettes!” says one man, while another wonders if there’s nothing sacred anymore. There’s no heat in their objections. Stevens situates his audience so that they can see what relative progress has been made for women since the nineteenth century. Throughout, Stanwyck is wearing far too much lipstick to play a country girl, and her Brooklyn smarts sometimes don’t match Annie’s more simple common sense, but she has some fine moments early on. Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas), a scout for Buffalo Bill, offers her his arm, and when she hesitates, her mother nods her approval of his alien, chivalrous gesture. Stanwyck’s Annie takes Jeff’s arm, finally, but her face definitely registers that she thinks such exaggerated deference to her sex is silly. The real Annie competed with marksman Francis Butler and beat him. Butler retired and soon proposed to her, and they lived out their lives together happily. In this film, Annie goes up against the fictional Toby, and when she and her mother see that she’s going to ruin his career if she beats him, Annie throws the match. Before Stanwyck does this, she looks down for a moment, as if she’s thinking, “Well, life is unfair , we knew that going in.” She didn’t have the heart to beat Toby, she tells her friends: “He was just too pretty,” she repeats, matter-of-factly. After Jeff brings Annie to the attention of Buffalo Bill (Moroni Olsen), they go out into the waning sunlight so that Bill can introduce her to his mostly male troupe, which responds with confusion and disdain. This sequence is done with a truly evocative series of magic hour shots that highlight Stevens’s eye for pictorial effects...

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