Cinema: This Side of Happiness

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Impatient but determined, Betty had prayed, pleaded and plotted for the role of Annie from the time she saw Ethel Merman do it in the 1946 Broadway hit. She never doubted she would get it, even after M-G-M outbid Paramount, her home studio, for the film rights. With Judy Garland cast in the lead and shooting already begun, Betty still insisted on betting an M-G-M executive that she would play the part.

After 30 days of expensive shooting by two directors, MGM's Garland had a nervous breakdown, and the studio had to start again from scratch. Betty sent emissaries scurrying to MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who said: "We'd be silly to give the part to somebody on another lot." But after rummaging around among its own players, the biggest star constellation in Hollywood, M-G-M decided that it needed Betty just as badly as she needed the part.

It was a decision that audiences are likely to approve. Originally tailored to Broadway's first lady of musicomedy, Annie Get Your Gun demands a star with high-voltage showmanship and an earthy flavor. Betty Hutton, who is not remarkably pretty, by movie standards, nor a remarkably good singer or dancer, has a vividly unique personality in a town that tends to reduce beauty and talent to mass-produced patterns. Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker.

Annie Get Your Gun breaks no new ground. But thanks to irrepressible Betty, Irving Berlin's fine ten-song score and a showmanlike production, it should leave moviegoers feeling that they have been roundly entertained. The picture sticks close to the original musicomedy book by Dorothy and Herbert Fields, takes all its music & lyrics from the original Berlin tunes. It loses a few laughs getting by the censor, as well as five of the show's lesser songs. It gains trom jettisoning a conventional romantic subplot and from the broader canvas of the screen.

Brimming with colorful costumes and extravagant, Hollywood-style Wild West shows, the film is a fictional embroidery of the romance and rivalry between Sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Crackshot Frank Butler (Broadway's Howard Keel). Annie, who can't miss anything she shoots at, eventually learns that You Can't Get a Man with a Gun. She gets him by learning how to shoot and miss.

Betty carries the show with such riotous energy and eagerness to please that she threatens to carry it too far. She plunges into her first two numbers like a bronco out of a rodeo pen, filling the screen with so much motion that it is hard to listen for the words—and impossible to ignore the singer. She lacks Ethel Merman's craftiness with comedy, but along with her unbridled vitality, she gives the role something that brassy Ethel Merman never attempted: she kindles the love story with poignancy, makes it seem something more sincere than a musicomedy plot. In a slow, sentimental number like They Say It's Wonderful, performed with breathless tenderness, she puts together the rare blend of singing and acting talent that makes lyrics carry emotion as well as melody. And, toward the end, when she bounces back into animal spirits to join Keel in Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, her strident comic style and Berlin's flamboyant duet seem to have been made for each other.