Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen THE LAST TYCOON MARKETING A FRECKLE-FACED ORPHAN IN MY LAST COLUMN, I was praising Annie for being a big investment that pays off in small ways. Its pleasures are in its details. For...
...Big as the house is, the movie gets very claustrophobic during this number...
...If they ever stopped believing in money, they'd jump out the window...
...Stark therefore decided to add dashes of vinegar to the milk of human kindness in which the original Annie wallowed, to spike its cuteness with zaniness...
...The urn's replacement is something at which I laughed, and so did my ten-year-old daughter...
...The only fireworks go off not in the singing and dancing, but in the sky overhead, where cascading showers of phosphorus spell out "The End...
...This was why he hired Huston, who had never done a musical before...
...In the film's early numbers, particularly "Hard-Knocks Life," Aileen Quinn and the other orphans display lots of energy...
...But the scene doesn't end there...
...The fact is that Stark wasn't interested in this property until he realized what an enormous "recognition factor" Annie has with the American public...
...The Broadway show was, in Stark's own words, "terrific for kids who sat on telephone books and old people in wheelchairs," but the movie would have to have a much broader appeal to return its cost...
...There are other producers who could have raised the money Annie required, and even spent it...
...Annie is good, but no classic...
...That was what That's Entertainment memorialized...
...but rare is the Hollywood executive who could have faced the fact that what he got for his money was worthless...
...Unexpectedly likable as I found Annie, though, I can't just leave it at that...
...The trouble with Stark's approach is that even if we don't buy all this crap he's making, we still pay for it...
...In the reduced version of "Easy Street," danced inside the orphanage, Burnett distinguishes herself primarily by striding into door jambs or putting her foot through a wall at certain key moments...
...He scales down not only "Easy Street" and the Radio City sequence, but "Tomorrow" and numerous other scenes...
...I don't know who added this little flourish, but it has to have been one of the people producer Ray Stark brought in to spice up the Broadway musical - screenwriter Carol Sobieski, director John Huston, maybe Holder himself - because Punjab wasn't in the original show...
...Stark shows in Annie that he is able to transcend even this most cherished article of the producer's faith...
...In a recent interview Stark said, "The fun I get out of the business is packaging and promotion...
...And that is what Annie ultimately lacks...
...Carol Burnett, as Miss Hannigan,'is the only one who might have matched Reinking - twenty years ago...
...A great deal of the energy spent on Annie went into that stuff instead of the movie itself, and ultimately we do get less movie for our admission price as a consequence...
...Stark showed his talent for producing on Annie by throwing away money...
...With her Radio City dances cut, Reinking's only real showcase is "We've Got Annie," a number performed at the Warbucks mansion...
...He reduces the entire production to a manageable set of details, to gestures, skits, and one-liners that can succeed by imagination alone...
...For instance, at one point Punjab (Geoffrey Holder), who has magical powers that include levitation, is amusing Annie (Aileen Quinn) by making a huge urn of flowers float from its pedestal to a table...
...At the other end of the film, in the finale, Quinn and Finney pad through a minor soft shoe, something adapted to Finney's lack of musical talent...
...Left to himself now, his audience gone, Punjab picks up the urn and carefully replaces it on its pedestal by hand...
...Once at a preview, Stark got all choked up and told the audience, "I can only hope that on my tombstone are the words: 'Annie, she is the one I was looking for.' " That's very poignant, but one mustn't get carried away...
...It's a gag with exactly the range, the mass appeal, that Stark wanted to give Annie on the screen...
...What he fell in love with was not the gutsy little orphan with freckles, but a marketing potential that he has now set up fifty companies manufacturing five hundred products to exploit...
...This may not be the sentiment he wants on the tombstone, but it's closer to the mark...
...No one else in the movie could have kept up with Reinking, which is why she seems like the odd woman out...
...What Huston had to offer was the knack for by-play that he's brought to all his movies since his debut as a director, forty years ago, in The Maltese Falcon...
...There has to be something fundamentally wrong in a musical where the one member of the cast who looks lost, out of place, is the only one who can sing and dance...
...Actually, the end came earlier, when actors like Albert Finney and Rex Harrison began appearing in musicals in place of real dancers...
...After they were made, Stark cut out the two biggest production numbers in the film - Reinking's "Let's Go to the Movies" sequence at Radio City, which I was talking about last time, and "Easy Street," whose costs included the building of a permanent, million-dollar set...
...A series of gestures he devised for Bogart, Greenstreet, and others in that film - a constant laying-on of hands that conveys the truths the dialogue tries to hide - is the sort of detail that convinces me Huston dreamed up the closing of the urn scene here...
...It never was the expense of the production numbers that made a musical great...
...But I think I'll let my wife take her next time...
...Then some crisis arises, and Annie is whisked away to more important events...
...At one point where she has a virtuoso kick to perform - over Tim Curry's head while they're dancing up some stairs - a stand-in danced the step for her...
...My daughter can't wait to see Annie again, and I'm sure she'll love it just as much...
...That's why I'm pursuing the subject of this movie into a second installment...
...But the dancing is mostly acrobatics (flips and cartwheels), and the choreography, the ability to guide our attention amidst all the movement, is provided by the editing rather than the dancing itself...
...You'll notice that one of the movie's stars whom I've mentioned, but had no occasion to praise, is Ann Reinking...
...Not only will the film stock on which Annie was shot disintegrate long before then, but so will its pleasures...
...Stark's talents aren't the bottom line in the movies, and I don't want to leave anybody with the impression they are...
...That's nice...
...Bits of business like this are just what a seasoned, savvy director would have added, and they're the kind of thing Stark hired Huston to create...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK...
...Reinking's talent suddenly threatens to bust Annie wide open at the seams, to blow the whole movie as sky-high as a bomb-throwing Bolshevik in an earlier scene was trying to blow Daddy Warbucks...
...It was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, all alone, on a dance floor as big as a football field and as shiny as the lid of a Steinway...
...The reason most producers can't admit that throwing money at a problem hasn't solved it is that money is the sine qua non of their careers...
...I suspect that it was Huston...
...I like that...
...But Burnett has now spent too much time on TV, sandwiching her talent between commercials...
...Really...
...If somebody wants to make That's Entertainment, Part Four in the year 2000, he's going to have to find musicals better than this to do it with...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 12
