Review of Annie Get Your Gun (1950) by Nate W — 08 May 2010

Despite arriving well ahead of the death of the movie musical, "Annie Get Your Gun" seems oddly out of place alongside fellow MGM contemporaries such as "An American in Paris", "Singin' in the Rain", and "The Band Wagon".

It has a lot of similar elements; candy-coloured sets, extravagent numbers, and catchy songs (courtesy of Irving Berlin), but something about didn't quite rub me the right way. Perhaps it was the irrepressible Betty Hutton's performance, which, quite frankly, is too much.

She seems to be channeling Ethyl Merman, who first popularized the role of Annie Oakley on stage, but Hutton has absolutely no power of restraint over her own exuberance, and makes an awkward romantic pairing with the more straight forward (and talented) Howard Keel as Frank Butler.

There is also something to be said about how the ridiculously non-PC portrayal of Native Americans makes the film feel even more dated than it already does.