 Starring: Howard Keel, Betty Hutton, Louis Calhern
Director: George Sidney
Year Of Release: 1950
Plot: Annie Oakley is a rural hick who ain’t got no larning, but is one hell of a shot. After beating sharp-shooter Frank Butler in a contest, she’s given a job as his assistant in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. While Annie and Frank gradually grows closer, he blows a gasket when she starts performing shooting tricks that make his own look pathetic. He storms off to a rival show, but despite their bickering, Annie still wants her man. |
Many older people like to talk about how things were better in the past. If you listen to them, modern society has gone to hell in a handcart, while the past was some sort of utopia of happy families, perfect communities and common decency. However all you need to do is watch a few old films to realise what a load of rubbish this is. Things may have changed in the past 60 years, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but there’s little doubt that if most modern people went back in time, they’d be horrified by much of the society they found.
A few weeks ago I wrote about who you can tell a lot about the past from old romantic comedies, and how the 1949 Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie Adam’s Rib showed both how the fight for sexual equality was going on a lot earlier than we normally think, and also how back then domestic violence seemed to be something people found desperately funny.
Today we’ve moved onto the Betty Hutton and Howard Keel musical Annie Get Your Gun. Surely the 1950 musical is just a bright, breezy romp full of Irving Berlin songs, with nothing to offend anyone? Wrong. To be honest, rewatching the film I found its attitudes almost unbelievable and rather sickening.
For a start there’s the sexual dynamic, where it’s presented as completely natural that women should be subservient to men. When Annie Oakley outdoes Frank Butler at shooting, we’re not supposed to think he’s being an ass by getting angry about it. No, it’s a perfectly reasonable response, and Annie is being the height of naivety to think a man could be pleased that a woman was achieving her full potential.
Even at the very end, there’s no sense that a man ought to alter his sexist, superior attitudes. It’s the woman’s job to act as if she’s crap even if she isn’t, because her only reason to exist isn’t to be a proper person in her own right, it’s to make arrogant men feel good about themselves (or to get patronised a lot).
While this sexism is worrying, particularly how natural it seems for everyone in the film to simply accept women’s inherent rubbishness, it’s the racism that’s most shocking.
Nowadays we tend to think of racism as coming with anger and bite. It may be based on ignorance and stupidity, but it’s full of venom and bile. What’s less common to see (at least so blatantly) is the sort of racism that isn’t based on hatred, but is there because the whole of society seems to openly accept that some groups of people are inherently inferior and unworthy of being treated equally. It’s racism where people don’t hate those who aren’t the same as them, it’s that people feel that in the same way they ‘know’ 2 plus 2 equals 4, they ‘know’ other races are inferior to the while folk.
Within the first few minutes of Annie Get Your Gun, we’ve been told Native Americans are unworthy of having a decent bed for the night and that it’s perfectly okay for white people to offer ‘squaws’ as part-payment if it’ll help seal the deal. We also get to see they’re stupid, cowardly and like to say ‘Ug’ a lot (just as in Disney’s Peter Pan, which is similarly cringe-inducing in its attitude to Native Americans).
There’s even a scene where Annie Oakley is doing a re-enactment of a mail coach robbery (of course the ‘Injuns’ are doing the thieving) and after doing some sharpshooting tricks, she proceeds to shoot a few Native Americans. The film does nothing to suggest she’s only pretending to shoot them, so that it comes across as if shooting an Indian on horseback is just another impressive sharpshooting trick, and if you have a few have to kill a few non-white people to make a Wild West show better, so what? (Of course, presumably she’s only pretending to shoot them in the show, but that’s not how the film presents it).
It’s also interesting to note that the film got more racist as the production went on. Originally it was going to be made with Judy Garland in the starring role, and she filmed a couple of the musical numbers (which are included on the DVD) before being forced to drop out due to ‘ill health’ (read: drugged up to the eyeballs and unable to function). One of the sequences she filmed was the musical number, I’m An Indian Too, where Annie Oakley becomes an Indian after Sitting Bull decides he wants her as a daughter (women apparently come further down the scale than Native Americans, as Annie is supposedly just meant to accept this, because some men tell her to).
In its original Judy Garland version, it is still pretty offensive, but it’s largely a gaudy, over-the-top, spectacle with little malice in it (although there’s an awful lot of white people in blackface). However after Garland dropped out and Betty Hutton was brought in to replace her, the entire sequence was completely reworked, so that rather than just dancing with the Indians, it’s now presented almost like an attack on Annie. The whole thing plays on the idea of the ‘savage’ non-whites, who no white woman is safe near. The way the camera films the sequence makes the Native Americans seem predatory and dangerous, with Annie needing to keep her wits about her so she can escape their evil clutches.
It’s a shockingly offensive sequence, but again it’s presented as is it’s the most natural thing in the world. Presumably everybody in 1950 instinctively believed that Native Americans were inferior beings who liked attacking white women, so including endless lines in a musical about how crap they are is merely backing-up what everyone already thought.
To be honest this sort of casual racism is even more shocking than the more vitriolic kind. Racism may still be a major problem in the modern age, and there are certainly a lot of issues around people having negative attitudes without even realising they might be seen as offensive, but at least we’ve got past the stage where a mainstream movie is prepared to openly and unsubtly lambast an entire race of people and tell women quite how subservient they should be (it does still happen, but it’s normally now done unconsciously rather than openly). All the problems of racism and sexism certainly aren’t sorted out, but even the fact we now consider these issues is a step forward.
It’s a problem that means modern stage productions of Annie Get Your Gun are comparatively rare and need to find ways around the musical’s racist and sexist core. For example the production that just opened in London’s Young Vic, starring Jane Horrocks, tries to deal with the problems by being cheeky about them, and adding lines to underscore just how outdated it is. Others productions have tweaked the plot to iron out the problematic attitudes completely.
Hopefully one day we’ll get to the point where we look back on the sexual and racial stereotypes of today’s films with the same discomfort that we now feel with movies like Annie Get Your Gun (the autobot twins in Tranformers 2 immediately springs to mind as the sort of thing you’d have hoped we’d have moved past by now), but there’s little doubt we’ve come as awful long way in the last 60 years.
So the next time someone starts telling you how great the past was, tell them to watch Annie Get Your Gun and then come back and let you know quite how far they’d like to defend the movie’s hideous attitudes, which the modern world has thankfully tried to get past, even if it hasn’t totally succeeded yet.
TIM ISAAC
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