Annie Get Your Gun (1950)

Directed by George Sidney. Starring Betty Hutton, Howard Keel, Louis Calhern, Keenan Wynn, J. Carrol Naish, Edward Arnold, Benay Venuta, Clinton Sundberg.

Rambunctious cornball musical follows the highly-fictionalized exploits of uncouth sharpshooter Annie Oakley as she joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and starts upstaging the show’s star (Keel), with whom she’s infatuated. Betty Hutton relentlessly mugs to the camera, Keel is a waxworks exhibition, and Louis Calhern makes for an avuncular showman, but the splashy Technicolor production survives on Irving Berlin’s tunes, some of which will be recognizable to people who’ve never even heard of the stage musical or film adaptation (“Anything You Can Do”, “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly”, and “There’s No Business Like Show Business”). The creaky, downright tasteless business with the Native Americans, however (including J. Carrol Naish as Sitting Bull!), stops the show dead in its tracks on more than one occasion. Busby Berkeley made some uncredited contributions to the direction, although it’s reported none of his footage was used for the final edit. Academy Award winner for Best Scoring.

60/100