Sunday with Barbara Stanwyck
Annie Oakley
Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley’s at the center of this 1935 movie with Barbara Stanwyck in the title role. Here, the Ohio native is portrayed as a man worshipper. When Stanwyck’s Oakley rides up with her mother and siblings—her pa died when she was young—and sees a picture of a fancy traveling cowboy, she’s instantly in love.
The rest of Annie Oakley is a free-wheeling romantic drama tucked inside a behind-the-scenes depiction of Bill Cody’s traveling show. “This is a real wild West show with he-men behaving just as they did on the range,” Cody says to a recently hired hand in his show. The audience assumes the newly hired gunslinger’s Annie Oakley, contracted in a previous scene by a talent scout (Melvyn Douglas) who witnessed Oakley in a shooting contest. It’s one of several twists to keep the audience on alert.
In fact, Annie Oakley’s mostly driven by perceptual effects. There’s jaunty music, bucking broncos in apparently real, long-form film footage, a 94-year-old Indian and Annie Oakley shooting item after item high in the air after jumping over an obstacle and sprinting for a rifle. There’s also Sitting Bull trying to scalp what he thinks is a dead Indian, cowboys versus Indians in a staged siege on a wagon train and a display of breathtaking and apparently authentic “horsemanship by Russian Cossacks.” Add negroes, “redskins” and trains as well as the conflict of everyone in the Wild West show trying to adapt to a woman in their midst. Stanwyck’s as game as ever.
Annie Oakley, directed by George Stevens, touches upon the role of storytelling and the press including concocting a promotional battle of the sexes. Stanwyck and the object of her affection, played by Preston Foster, capably reject the hype—he says at one point: “I know you can beat me and I’m proud of you”—and, as usual, Stanwyck’s feisty and petite woman looks up to man. Annie Oakley’s hero worship never wavers.
Interesting aspects include seeing Stanwyck as Oakley being introduced to the czar and czarina in St. Petersburg during a European tour. Perhaps unintentionally, this marks a contrast between the movie’s later 19th century setting and the year, 1935—during the Red decade—that Annie Oakley debuted in theaters.
Sunday with Barbara Stanwyck