I mentioned last week that the 1980s movie version of the Broadway musical Annie was coming up on TV this week. It'll be on tomorrow at 5:51 AM on Starz Kids and Familiy, with a repeat at 8:00 PM tomorrow.
Aileen Quinn plays Annie, a little orphan whose parents dropped her off at the New York orphanage for girls run by Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett). Hannigan is a nasty little blankety-blank, and makes the kids do all sorts of menial labor, kind of like the orphanage in Oliver Twist. The kids rebel by singing, while Annie is actually able to escape once, which is how she winds up with Sandy the dog.
Anyhow, Annie and Sandy get caught by a policeman who returns them to Miss Hannigan. At the same time, Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), personal secretary to ultra-wealthy Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney going bald) shows up at the orphanage. For PR reasons, Warbucks is looking to have a kid at his palatial mansion for the holidays. Annie eavesdrops on this, and is able to convince Grace to set requirements of what kind of kid gets selected to be exactly those requirements that Annie meets.
Annie is enchanted by the Warbucks mansion, and despite the fact that "Daddy" Warbucks didn't exactly want to do this at first, he's bowled over by Annie's charm, the same way everybody in Shirley Temple movies was, even though this is set before Temple became a star so name-dropping her is one of many anachronisms. (The Greta Garbo movie Camille is even more surprising, especially considering that Annie wasn't released by MGM.
Annie still talks fondly about her parents, who left her at the orphanage with nothing but the clothes on her back and half of a locket. Warbucks decides he's going to find Annie's parents for her and give them a reward to be able to take care of Annie. He doesn't mention the locket, however, so that the multitude of imposters will overlook a key fact they need to claim Annie, a sort of 1930s form of two-factor identification.
Miss Hannigan has the other half of the locket, as Annie's parents are in fact dead. (How Grace wasn't informed of this seems a major plot hole to me, as any sort of fostering would, I should think, have had to go through the government.) Two of Hannigan's old con-artist friends, Rooster (Tim Curry) and Lily (Bernadette Peters) show up willing to play the part of Annie's parents, since they'd be able to produce the locket. In exchange, they'll split the reward with Hannigan and dispose of Annie. The other orphans overhear all this and try to warn Warbucks.
If you're a 10-year-old girl who likes musicals, you'll love Annie. If you're either not a 10-year-old girl or don't care so much for musicals, you'll probably ahve a lot of problems with Annie. Making things even more difficult is that for the most part, it's children doing the singing, with the decidedly imperfect voices that pretty much every child has.
Everybody is also sharply drawn as either pure and virtuous or unalloyed evil. This is something that will work for kids, but as adults, it gets a bit grating. Still, even though I didn't care so much for Annie this is a much clearer case of a movie that some people are definitely going to like, and not so much a poor movie.
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