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Misery Jane

Calamity Jane

Warner Home Video

1953 / Color / 1:37 shining frame / 101 min. / April 30, 2002 / 19.98

Starring

Doris Prime, Howard Keel, Allyn Ann McLerie, Philip Carey,
Dick Wesson, Paul Harvey, Chubby Johnson, Shout Robbins

Cinematography

Wilfred M. Cline

Art Government

John Beckman

Haziness Editor

Irene Morra

Fresh Music

David Buttolph, Sammy Fain, Howard Jackson, Paul Francis Webster

Written by

James O'Hanlon

Produced by

William Jacobs

Directed by

David Butler

Nowhere near the achievement of


Annie Get Your Gun


as either a production or
a musical,

Calamity Jane

is still a very entertaining musical comedy mainly because of the bright
and charismatic Doris Day. Spunky and fun as a frontier tomboy, her romantic problems are especially
interesting now as a telling comment on '50s concepts of femininity.

Synopsis:

The perfect unlady-like Distress Jane (Doris Day) promises to bring illustrious actress
Adelaid Adams (Gale Robbins) to the glamour-in need miners of Deadwood, but reappears with a
phony, Adelaid's maid Katie Brown (Allyn McLerie). Both Wild Pecker Hickock (Howard Keel) and city
cavalry officer Lt. Danny Gilmartin (Philip Carey) inhale an present flash to Katie. Jane is at elementary
confused, and thanks to Katie's help, gets herself in more impound shape to woo a gentleman for
herself. But when Jane gets jealous, indeed more trouble is on the way.

Calamity Jane

is one of the last original studio musicals before the Rogers and Hammerstein crowd
took over; and it's from Warner Brothers, who generally came in second to MGM in this genre. But Warners
had Doris Day, a powerhouse of talent who made stale material fresh and fresh material shine.

Calamity
Jane

is dated in many ways, but nothing about Day begs for an apology.

Betty Hutton's grating Hick in

Annie Get Your Gun

took some getting used to.
Doris is theatrically so right as the athletic, volatile Calamity that we like her immediately.
She tells tall tales, makes threats idle and real to the cowboys at the bar and in general is
an all-around loose cannon. She has delusions that the Army Lieutenant (a typically sincere-wooden Philip
Carey) loves her and treats the man who could really appreciate her, the duded-up Wild Bill, as
an equal. Jane really has no notion of a sexual identity for herself, although she says she wants
a house and kids; she's likely to rush off to perform some suicidal rescue at a moment's notice.
All in all, she doesn't think anything through.

Doris Day dominates the proceedings. Howard Keel stays even more in the background than he did in

Annie

and sings a bit in his overly operatic style. There are several songs and a fairly
okay one called

Windy City

, but the standout is a pop ballad,

Secret Love

. It is one of Day's best
songs ever and the reason Savant wanted the disc. It's so beautiful, it stops the show … but who's
complaining? It easily won the Oscar for best song that year. If you hate musicals about noisy women, just
bop on down to chapter 31.

T.i. Feat Justin Timberlake free mp3 link

A lot of revisionism has aired about the sexual politics of

Calamity Jane

, the kind of
stuff that sees everything in terms of repression and liberation.

The Celluloid Closet

, a
documentary about gay themes in movies, put forward an interesting line of thought about how lesbians
remember reacting to the film. Calamity is more masculine than the men and has to be taught from scratch
the basics of socially-sanctioned femininity. In 1953 that was one part allure, to three parts comportment,
to six parts housecleaning, to twenty parts cooking. Over the course of a song Jane's
wretched shack is transformed into a sparkling 'homey' cottage complete with flowers on the window
sill and their names on the door. The important thing about all this is that even when dolled up
in fancy dress and hairstyle, Jane never stops being Jane - she still walks like a man and displays
her emotions like an angry woodchuck (irate marmot?). According to interviews I've seen, gay activists
like the idea that the story allows Jane to remain essentially herself. A dress and some makeup don't
suddenly transform her into a Gibson Girl.

Beyond that, the radical politics lose me. I don't dig the interpretation of the show as some kind of
drag festival just because comedian Dick Wesson dresses as a woman, or believe that
leads Carey and Keel strut their macho to compensate for their feminine sides, yadda
yadda. Sometimes a guy dressed as a girl is just that and nothing more.  

¹

Maybe it's all a carefully - rehearsed stage illusion, but ex-big-band singer Doris Day had about the
freshest personality of anybody in show business. In a newsreel extra her beaming
reaction to being presented with an award is about as sincere as sincere can get. Her smile
just brightens up one's heart. Even more telling is Day's willingness to play in a movie where the
supporting actresses (particularly the cute Allyn McLerie) get to
be more conventionally attractive. In the old Hollywood, you'd think there must have been a
special talent agency where musical producers could hire showgirls guaranteed to be homlier than
'the star,' no matter how old or broken-down she was. Day had enough self-possession
not to insist that every other woman in her films be a bow-wow, as so many female stars do now.
For that, she's truly a class act.

I'd better offer a caveat for people sensitive to older attitudes about Indians in movies - for
its attitude re: Native Americans,

Calamity Jane

is no better and maybe worse than

Annie
Get Your Gun

. The 'varmint redskins' are basically there to be made fun of or shot dead, and even
for '53 the treatment is politically retro. I've done my duty.

Warner's DVD of

Calamity Jane

is good but suffers from the familiar DVD-from-a-Technicolor-source
dilemma. Made in '53, it was probably shot in 3-strip Technicolor. Assuming those three strips still
exist in good shape, they


could


be combined to create a dazzling, grain-free master, the way


The Wizard of Oz


and a number of other
blockbuster
classic films have been. But

Calamity Jane

's projected video revenue in no way justifies such
an expense to the studio bean counters. The transfer source for this disc is
some existing intermediate element, that recombined the three strips into a standard non-Technicolor
negative. Whenever this element was made, all kinds of alignment and contrast flaws were
built-in to it. The grain is high in all the opticals and rear-screen shots. The color varies somewhat,
and rarely 'pops' into an original look. And most visibly, in many shots the recombined matrices
are off-register (shrinking at different rates, most likely) causing the picture to momentarily look like a
misprinted newspaper photo.

On DVD most of these flaws are corrected (in telecine they can do absolute wonders now), but nothing
can align the permanently printed, misaligned shots. Luckily, they tend to be wider views, and
the beautiful closeups appear to be unaffected. Until some economic method is invented to restore
Tech films by the bushel, we'll be stuck with shows like this that don't quite make the grade. Warners
has done the best they can in this case - and most viewers will never notice the flaws.

Extras include a trailer and two short newsreel clips: Doris Day receiving an award, and a rodeo parade
in Deadwood, South Dakota for a premiere of

Calamity Jane

.

On a graduation of First-rate, Commendable, Lovely, and Deficient,

Calamity Jane

rates:

Large screen: Simple Good

Video: High-mindedness -

Sound: Good

Supplements: trailer, two newsreel clips

Packaging: Snapper case

Reviewed: May 17, 2002

Footnotes:

1.

Savant got deeply into musicals after seeing

Singin' in the Rain

in
college, but I don't have any deep psychological bond with the spirit of Judy Garland or anything,
thank you. By the same token, after

Hercules

, I went to assure a lot of muscleman action movies
in the '60s and a homoerotic bit not till hell freezes over crossed my thick brainpan. So much for the model acknowledge on
'guys who like show tunes.'

^Return

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

The title says it all. “Bikini Bloodbath” is an in your face ‘fuck
who cares’ if we make fools of ourselves campy satire on the 1980s slasher
films. It’s a shoestring budget indie that’s a straight-to-video release.
It takes a stab at ripping exploitative blood-splatter films that are in
themselves too whacked-out to be ripped any further. The plotless and silly
juvenile sex comedy, filled with sight gags, has an energetic cast seemingly
having fun goofing around with this outlandish material. Unfortunately
that fun didn’t transfer to this viewer.

It features Debbie Rochon as Miss Johnson, the perverse lesbian high
school gym coach who pines for the minors in her charge. Her class of bikini-clad
female volleyball players, who love showing off their titties in the shower,
being airheads, talking smutty and picking on Nerdy Suzy (Sheri
Toczko) because she smells, are having a slumber party for the in-crowd
organized by their star volleyball player Jenny (Leah Ford). It comes as
no surprise that outsider Nerdy Suzy is not invited. At the party, the
bikini-clad girls jump into a hot tub nursing girlie drinks and blab about
boys while their counterparts, a bunch of overweight high school boys (who
look like men in their thirties), clad in T-shirts saying ‘football player’
across the front have their own stag party. Most of the boys have a blast
grabbing each other’s asses, as they do dance routines and huddle up together
in football formations. The two who don’t appreciate the grab ass, venture
over to the slumber party to ogle the girls. In the meantime there’s a
psychopathic chef (Robert Cosgrove Jr.) on the loose wearing a chef’s hat
and using a meat cleaver to slice up a healthy number of players from each
group including Mr. Robinson (Phil Hall), the lecherous neighbor of Nerdy
Suzy, and a dude getting a blowjob from one of the bikini-clad girls in
his car.

This deliberately grating and cheesy splatter-fest comedy might find
its true audience with those who survived the serial-killer chef’s bloodbath
and can laugh about it.

Download Hum FREE mp3

Based on a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yentl tells the gossip of a uninitiated Eastern European woman, circa 1904, who disguises herself as a wretch in busted to seek her passion after studying holy scripture, an endeavor restricted exclusively to men in orthodox Jewish culture.

Moving from her native village and passing as a pubescent boy, Yentl has no problem in the scholarly world, but tragi-comic results stem from the romantic situation her presence creates. Befriended by her brash, attractive fellow student Avigdor, wonderfully played by Mandy Patinkin, Yentl falls in love with him.

When Avigdor is prevented from marrying his lovely fiancee Hadass (a china doll Amy Irving) through a technicality of religious law, Avigdor pushes Yentl to marry Hadass in his stead.

Songs by Michel Legrand, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, have been carefully planned as interior monologs for Yentl.

In league with ace cinematographer David Watkin, Streisand has created a fine-looking period piece, working on Czech locations and in English studios.

1983: Best Original Song Score.

Nominations: Best Supp. Actress (Amy Irving), Art Direction, Song (’Papa, Can You Hear Me?’, ‘The Way He Makes Me Feel’)