Sean Burns
There are a lot of arguments as to what constitutes a Gen-Xer and when the proper cutoff dates are, but a pretty good rule of thumb is that you’re one of us if your first John Huston movie was Annie. (Your first Robert Altman movie being Popeye is also an acceptable metric.) I like to kid around and tell people that Fat City and Wise Blood were my Hustons of choice back in elementary school, but the truth of the matter is that I grew up with two little sisters, so you can bet your bottom dollar that I still know every word to all the songs from Annie.
Adapting the smash 1977 musical about an adorable orphan was an unlikely career choice for Huston. Heck, Harold Gray’s daily comic strip was an odd choice for a Broadway show in the first place. The often-bizarre, globetrotting adventures of the red-headed ten-year-old with empty circles for eyes began in 1924, and over the decades pitted our plucky heroine against spies, gangsters, and at one point Annie even blew up a Nazi submarine. The strip was cancelled in 2010, its unsettling final installment stranding the kidnapped orphan in Guatemala with a villain known as “the Butcher of the Balkans.”
The Broadway show doesn’t have any espionage or international intrigue, as writer Thomas Meehan couldn’t find much stage-friendly material in the comics so he spun his own storyline about Annie being rescued from a Depression-era orphanage of Dickensian squalor by a gruff, multi-millionaire arms manufacturer with the wonderfully on-the-nose name of Daddy Warbucks. Her innate goodness melts the heart of this ruthless capitalist, who converts to a New Deal Democrat and even sings the show’s signature song “Tomorrow” alongside FDR and Eleanor. (In the original strip, Daddy Warbucks died of despair when Roosevelt was elected. This was later retconned to just a coma, which he emerged from only after the president’s passing.)
“Presented by” Mike Nichols, the show was a blockbuster that ran for more than six years – Nichols was also an investor who referred to the returns as “my comic book annuity” — tapping into the post-Watergate hunger for uncomplicated uplift that fueled similarly spirited hits like “Rocky.” It’s a light, unassuming little story that somehow became the most expensive movie musical ever made, with producer Ray Stark sparing no expense in attempting to replicate the lumbering, elephantine roadshow extravaganzas of the 1960s. Nichols’ gossamer touch was notably nowhere to be found.
In hiring the then-76-year-old Huston, Stark said he was hoping to mimic the movie’s storyline, figuring the macho, larger-than-life brawler would be won over by the sweetness of his young charges. Indeed, it’s incredibly amusing to think of the elephant-hunting Huston surrounded on the set by a bunch of singing little girls, and as Daddy Warbucks, Finney puts on a fun facsimile of his director’s unique mid-Atlantic accent. (The film adds a throwaway line explaining that the character is originally from Liverpool, presumably to justify the casting of an Englishman. But they needn’t have bothered as Finney sounds less like the Beatles and more like Noah Cross.)
It’s a really lovely performance by Finney, who would work again with Huston two years later in an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano – a project to which they both seemed more temperamentally suited. Still, he doesn’t condescend to this material in the slightest and it’s impossible to watch Annie without being at least a little moved when this blustery old coot reveals his softer side. His work is even more impressive considering how co-star Aileen Quinn is giving one of those grating, overprepared kid performances without a single genuine moment. It’s surely not Quinn’s fault that she reads every scene like an Ovaltine commercial, but the Razzies gave her a special award for “Worst New Star” all the same, because a mere two years into their existence that worthless asshole organization thought it would be funny to publicly humiliate an eleven-year-old girl.
Huston had never directed a musical before, and nobody would ever call this one light on its feet. Yet there’s something to be said for the sheer scale of the thing, and those songs by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin get stuck in your head and stay there. (Just ask Jay-Z. Meanwhile, I’m about to enter day three of humming “Maybe.”) There are a trio of lip-smacking villain performances from Tim Curry, Bernadette Peters and especially Carol Burnett as the boozy, man-hungry orphanage martinet. Burnett goes so big I remember one of my mother’s friends saying she singlehandedly ruined the movie. But I mean, it’s Annie. Did you want to see a subtle Miss Hannigan?
I love the “Let’s Go to the Movies” number they added for the film, the opulence of Radio City Music Hall and the Rockettes providing a jarring contrast to the run-down suburban multiplex where I first saw the picture on a family outing. (I’m pretty sure that I asked my parents, “Why couldn’t we have gone to see this there?” Nowadays I watch the scene and ask, “Who takes a kid to see Camille?”) Huston brings a hoary, old Hollywood charm to the endeavor, most queasily in the presentation of Daddy Warbucks’ bodyguards Punjab and the Asp, the former played by Bond villain and beloved 7-up pitchman Geoffrey Holder, an Alvin Ailey dancer who won a Tony for directing The Wiz. Punjab wears a turban and casts telekinetic spells on household objects like a snake-charmer, his entrances accompanied by what a pal calls “Swami music.” Yet Holder’s such an endearing performer you find yourself enjoying the character even as you cringe.
“They don’t build movies like this anymore,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, and it’s tough not to admire the sheer volume of labor that went into this ungainly Annie. You can always feel the heavy exertion behind the spectacle, which I suppose is somehow fitting for a hard knock life.
“Annie” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
