Adapting the smash 1977 musical about an adorable orphan was an unlikely career choice for Huston. Heck, Harold Gray\u2019s 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 \u201cthe Butcher of the Balkans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Broadway show doesn\u2019t have any espionage or international intrigue, as writer Thomas Meehan couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s signature song \u201cTomorrow\u201d 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\u2019s passing.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPresented by\u201d Mike Nichols, the show was a blockbuster that ran for more than six years \u2013 Nichols was also an investor who referred to the returns as \u201cmy comic book annuity\u201d — tapping into the post-Watergate hunger for uncomplicated uplift that fueled similarly spirited hits like \u201cRocky.\u201d It\u2019s 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\u2019 gossamer touch was notably nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In hiring the then-76-year-old Huston, Stark said he was hoping to mimic the movie\u2019s storyline, figuring the macho, larger-than-life brawler would be won over by the sweetness of his young charges. Indeed, it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t have bothered as Finney sounds less like the Beatles and more like Noah Cross.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a really lovely performance by Finney, who would work again with Huston two years later in an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry\u2019s Under the Volcano<\/em><\/a> \u2013 a project to which they both seemed more temperamentally suited. Still, he doesn\u2019t condescend to this material in the slightest and it\u2019s impossible to watch Annie<\/em> 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\u2019s surely not Quinn\u2019s fault that she reads every scene like an Ovaltine commercial, but the Razzies gave her a special award for \u201cWorst New Star\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Huston had never directed a musical before, and nobody would ever call this one light on its feet. Yet there\u2019s 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\u2019m about to enter day three of humming \u201cMaybe.\u201d) 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\u2019s friends saying she singlehandedly ruined the movie. But I mean, it\u2019s Annie<\/em>. Did you want to see a subtle Miss Hannigan?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I love the \u201cLet\u2019s Go to the Movies\u201d 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\u2019m pretty sure that I asked my parents, \u201cWhy couldn\u2019t we have gone to see this there<\/em>?\u201d Nowadays I watch the scene and ask, \u201cWho takes a kid to see Camille<\/em>?\u201d) Huston brings a hoary, old Hollywood charm to the endeavor, most queasily in the presentation of Daddy Warbucks\u2019 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<\/em>. Punjab wears a turban and casts telekinetic spells on household objects like a snake-charmer, his entrances accompanied by what a pal calls \u201cSwami music.\u201d Yet Holder\u2019s such an endearing performer you find yourself enjoying the character even as you cringe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey don\u2019t build movies like this anymore,\u201d Vincent Canby wrote<\/a> in The New York Times<\/em>, and it\u2019s tough not to admire the sheer volume of labor that went into this ungainly Annie<\/em>. You can always feel the heavy exertion behind the spectacle, which I suppose is somehow fitting for a hard knock life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Annie” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/annie2-1024x667.jpg\")
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