I've mentioned before that one of my earliest classic film memories involved the whole family getting together and watching the Doris Day movie Calamity Jane. Both my grandfather and one of my uncles were involved in the movie theater business as managers and projectionists, which meant that my uncle had somehow gotten access to a bunch of prints (I suspect that some of them may have been bootlegs, too, by the VCR days). So they would show movies from time to time on a homemade screen, and Calamity Jane was the one I remember not being my type of movie. Anyhow, it was on TCM earlier this week as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and will be on again tomorrow (April 3) at 4:00 PM as part of a centenary salute to Day. So I recorded it and watched it not only to do a review for tomorrow's showing, but also to give the movie a second chance.
I noticed right from the opening credits why a boy of about five or six, as I would have been for that showing, would be turned off by the movie. The opening credits, segueing into the first scene, are a musical number set on a stagecoach; if you're not a fan of something like "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis (and I'm not), you're not going to care for this musical number either. That stagecoach is coming in to Deadwood in the Dakota Territory (now South Dakota), where "Calamity" Jane Canary lives, making a living riding shotgun on the stages.
Calam, as she's sometimes called, is in many ways one of the boys, wearing outdated buckskin outfits while being a sharpshooter, and taking in a phony homespun way with a really bad accent that makes you wonder whether people really talked like this. Jane has a platonic male friend in Wild Bill Hickok (Howard Keel), but another man she's really interested in romantically, Lt. Gilmartin (Philip Carey) stationed at the fort nearby. Jane has saved Lt. Gilmartin from the Sioux on multiple occasions, but because of Jane's manliness in saving him, Gilmartin doesn't realize that she really loves him.
In town is a saloon that has a nightclub-type stage, where manager Henry Miller (Paul Harvey) has announced the coming attraction of Chicago actress Francis Fryer. Unfortunately for him, Francis is a man (Dick Wesson), and Henry, knowing his audience will riot, forces Francis to dress as a woman and do a number. Meanwhile, one of the audience members has a photo of actress Adelaid Adams, currently performing in Chicago, who is obviously more beautiful than Francis. After the audience does in fact riot, Jane promises she can get Adelaid from Chicago to perform in Deadwood.
In a terribly unfunny scene, Jane is shown to be tremendously ignorant when she gets to Chicago, not understanding the big city at all. She gets to Adelaid's dressing room after the show just after Adelaid has told her dresser Katie Brown (Allyn McLerie) she's going back to Europe, but leaving Katie several of her outfits. So when Jane gets to the dressing room she's talking to Katie but thinking she's talking to Adelaid. Katie is happy to keep up the illusion, because it will give her a chance to perform, which she's always wanted. And she looks close enough to Adelaid that perhaps the audience won't notice.
Katie and Jane eventually become good friends, living in a cabin Jane has in the woods but that she hasn't normally used. Katie helps Jane freshen up the cabin, becoming more of a woman in the process, and one who might steal men's hearts. In fact, it's time for the men and women to pair up, as the fort is going to hold its annual ball. Gilmartin and Wild Bill would both like to take Katie to the ball, with Gilmartin winning the luck of the draw. This makes Jane unhappy, as well as Wild Bill's guest. Jane gets even more pissed when she finds that Gilmartin is thinking of marrying Katie. But since the movie is going to have a happy ending, we know that Jane and Wild Bill are in fact a perfect match.
Watching Calamity Jane again as an adult for the first time in decades, it's easy to see why some people wouldn't like this. Doris Day, having to put on the accent and talk in a contrived way, is served poorly by the script. This is especially true in the Chicago scene that insults Jane's (and our) intelligence. Also, if you're not a fan of the artifical musical numbers that filled musicals like this during the Studio Era, it's going to be tough to warm to Calamity Jane.
But, at the same time, I can see why some people are really going to enjoy Calamity Jane. Everybody does a professional job with the material they're given, and some of the comedy does work, most notably the scene poor Dick Wesson has to do in drag. The Technicolor is also quite vibrant in the print TCM ran. And if you like other studio-era musicals, you'll probably like Calamity Jane too.
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