User Reviews

Barbara Stanwyck, as I have mentioned in other reviews, was a tough woman but a likable one, at least with me. I don't normally go for those tough dames but her voice and personality she brought to a lot of roles always attracted me. A case in point was this movie. I doubt if another actress would have made this a better-than-average film, which Stanwyck did.

Preston Foster's character in here, meanwhile, undergoes one of the fastest transformations I've ever seen on film, from arrogant pig to very likable good guy in no time at all. In fact, he turned out to be such a good guy that parts of this film, where "Toby Walker" was wronged, are difficult to watch.

There's a little humor also thrown in this western, mainly involving "Sitting Bull." It's been a long time since I've seen this film but I would definitely watch it again if it came out on DVD.

A decent Thirties era melodrama loosely based on the life of Annie Oakley. I looked into Oakley a bit after seeing this film, and her life has been highly fictionalized. Oakley was a bit of a feminist for her day, and that did come through a little bit in the film. (Rational feminism, not the semi-nutty political feminism of recent decades) Barbara Stanwyck did a jam-up job playing the backwoods girl, and looked awesome doing it. (of course) Oakley, for all her talent, was a bit deficient in the hotness factor. But, hey this is a movie.

The film heavily featured Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and I wonder a bit how close they were to accuracy on that. After all the show was still in living memory when this movie was filmed. No buffalo were shown, although they were alluded to once. I suppose they were very scarce in those days.

Anyway, I liked the film more than I expected to. Check it out.

George Stevens directs this biography on the early career of sharp-shooter Annie Oakley as if it were a star-crossed lovers' tale, replete with heartache and self-sacrifice. Backwoods girl from Ohio in the 1890s enters a shooting contest against world's champion Toby Walker and nearly beats him; this leads to a co-starring spot in Buffalo Bill's traveling western show, where the primrose gal becomes a star and falls in love with competitor Walker. Barbara Stanwyck was born to play Annie Oakley, yet her performance isn't the raucous hoot one might expect (this is director Stevens' fault, who lingers on Annie's sympathy and compassion for others so long, it makes her seem like a bleeding-heart). Still, Stanwyck is the reason to watch, and she's best in the film's first-half--when Annie still has a little gumshun in her and playful self-assurance. Stevens seems more interested in the budding love story between Oakley and Walker than in creating an actual document of Oakley's colorful life (which we are told at the start was stranger than any fiction). Certainly a good try, with funny bits of business happening along the sidelines and plenty of blustery character actors in support. **1/2 from ****

Fictionalized biography of real-life sharpshooter Annie Oakley. As with all Hollywood biopics, past and present, it plays fast & loose with the facts. These things usually don't bother me, as long as the movie is entertaining. This one is pretty good, with a great performance from Barbara Stanwyck. Also good work from Preston Foster, Moroni Olsen, Melvyn Douglas, and a quality supporting cast. Loved Chief Thunderbird as Sitting Bull and Iron Eyes Cody as his translator. The highlight of the movie is the footage from the wild west show.

As with the later Annie Get Your Gun, this features the scene where Annie throws a shooting contest so her man won't look bad. The real-life Annie actually beat her guy, Frank Butler, and later married him. He was happy for her to have the spotlight. So a guy in the late 19th century was more secure with himself than the men involved with making these stories in the 20th century.

More people are more familiar with the stage musical, so if you've seen that version, you'll notice the great similarities between it and this 1935 film. While on tour on Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, young and innocent Barbara Stanwyck gets hooked into a shooting contest with the nation's best, Preston Foster. She gets adopted by the traveling troupe and goes on tour, learning about life and love along the way.

Despite her thick Brooklyn accent, Barbara Stanwyck is totally adorable as the title sharpshooter in Annie Oakley. She's little and packs a punch, which is all that the role requires. It doesn't matter what her accent is-just listen to Ethel Merman! Some of the Wild West show scenes are pretty fun to watch, and it looks like the stunt people had a good time. This version is so similar to the musical, you can actually see the actors pause as they wait for their music cues to start singing! Check this one out if you liked the Betty Hutton version.

I've always loved Annie Oakley. I've always loved Barbara Stanwyck too. I'm sure one is related to the other. This used to be one of those old, mid-morning movies that was shown fairly often. If you stayed home from school, (ahem) SICK, you got to see it. Cowboys, Indians, Buffalo Bill, his Wild West Show, sharpshooting, a (yucky) love story, and the charming and beautiful Barbara Stanwyck. Hmmm, what a way to recover enough to return to school!!! Barbara Stanwyck was a liberated woman playing liberated roles long before it was in vogue.

Great license is taken with history, but this film was made when heroes were bigger than life and legend ruled. It's a nicely told story, tracing the life of a young girl, from the backwoods to a life of world-wide celebrity (yes, and love too). "Annie's" skills were real, but she had lots of help learning "showmanship". There are a lot of funny moments, warm moments, and selfless (O Henry type) acts. These "flesh" out the story and lead you right into a joyous ending. (AIN'T LOVE GRAND!)

Very nicely done, it will please "new" audiences and old-timers alike. The younger crowd should especially like "Annie Oakley". They don't make movies like this anymore. It's a fitting tribute to Annie Oakley, American legend, and folk hero.....

PS--- I gave this a 9 out of 10 rating. I was tempted to give it a 10, after all, it was made in 1935 and is still good....

I wanted to like this RKO biopic of Little Sure Shot, but liabilities kept getting in the way. First, it's really not well written at all. The romance between Annie and Frank Butler (here called Toby Walker; guess he, or his heirs, didn't want him mentioned) is undeveloped. We don't see what attracts them to one another, and, as played by the uncharismatic Preston Foster, he's rather a jerk. Poor Melvyn Douglas, as the Wild West Show's manager, is left on the sidelines, with nothing to play. Stanwyck is sincere and appealing, but her Brooklyn accent keeps sneaking into the Ohio-bred Annie's dialogue, and Chief Sitting Bull is portrayed as an idiot, among a good deal of Indian stereotyping. Pert Kelton is stuck playing an unconvincing femme fatale, and the comedy is limited to a) Sitting Bull's idiocy and b) laughing at drunks. George Stevens was learning his craft, and manages some exciting sequences, and the 1880s period atmosphere is strong. But it has an assembly-line feel, and Annie needs more personality than the screenwriters provided. Said Dorothy Fields, who later wrote the book to "Annie Get Your Gun" with her brother Herbert, "We did some research on the real Annie Oakley and Frank Butler and found that they were the dullest people in the world. She used to sit in her tent and knit, for God's sake."

This film is listed under the "western" genre, but it is not a western, unless you consider Cincinnati part of the wild west. Also it is listed as a drama, which is true, but it also contains comedic elements, often attributable to the Sitting Bull character.

People write about how fictionalized the story is, but actually many of the main elements of the story are true.

In the film, Toby Walker (Preston Foster) is a sharpshooter from New York who visits Cincinnati for an exhibition. There he signs a contract to perform in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Most of that is true, though his real name was Frank Butler and he was from Ireland.

While in Cincinnati, he makes a wager with a local inn owner that he can beat any challenger. The innkeeper calls on Annie Oakley (Barbara Stanwyck) to do the shooting. In real life, the name "Annie Oakley" came shortly afterward and Annie wins the contest, unlike in the film where she loses intentionally because she feels sorry for Toby.

Annie also signs up with Buffalo Bill and the story follows both trick shooters on the tour. I will not detail the remaining storyline, but it bears a resemblance to "A Star is Born".

As depicted, Annie really was from Ohio--a small hamlet named North Star. She was born in a log cabin and actually had a very hard childhood.

Toby Walker is portrayed as a rather nasty guy, at least at first. The same approach was later used in "Annie Get Your Gun" on stage and screen. But the film has a great Hollywood ending.

The depiction of the Wild West Shows is abbreviated but accurate. It is almost like viewing a piece of history. When the film starts, the year is approximately 1875. The Battle of Little Bighorn took place in 1876, so tales of "dangerous" Indians were current. Sitting Bull really did join the show for about four months, though it was later, approximately 1884. He and Annie did develop a special bond.

My point in mentioning this bit of history is to explain that the timing in the film may not have been totally accurate, but the appearance of Sitting Bull in the Wild West Show was a remarkable thing, so it is understandable that the script writers wanted to include him in the story.

The film does a good job of portraying Annie as the nearly mythical person she actually was. I like Barbara Stanwyck's portrayal. Though Ms. Stanwyck might be more of a looker than Annie, the real Frank Butler did marry her and was dedicated to her throughout his lifetime.

The historical Annie Oakley came from a Quaker family and had an understated, quiet demeanor that often comes as a surprise to people who know her only from the over-the-top Hutton movie or the typically asinine performance of Ethel "One Volume, Full Blast" Merman.

Many people still remembered Oakley the person at the time of this movie; she had passed away only in 1926 and was still a celebrity, shooting perfect hundreds in a row in 1922, aged 62. The source of one of Barbara Stanwyck's great early characterizations, Oakley probably shared personality traits with the actress. Stanwyck was also very quiet and intensely private during the 1930s, socializing on her ranch only with the Jack Bennies, Joan Crawford, and the Joel McCreas.

Box office returns were good, for a Stanwyck of this vintage. They would have been better if RKO hadn't clumsily stepped on the film by releasing 'In Person' only a few days after 'Oakley' came out, causing some competition within RKO's own fanbase. Still, it was Stanwyck's biggest box office of her career up to that time and she was slowly moving out of B films.

The contemporary critics loved Stanwyck's performance: "The New York World-Telegram wrote that, "The talented and attractive Barbara Stanwyck gives by far the best screen performance of her career. Miss Stanwyck plays the role with such commendable restraint and with such feeling for the character that she almost becomes Annie Oakley." Critic Richard Watts (he did film criticism for a couple of years at the beginning of his long and distinguished career) praised the entire film and said that "Miss Stanwyck has never been more real and touching than she is in the title role."

And there is no reason to argue with them - it's a great performance by one of the greatest actresses under strong direction by one of the master artists of film, George Stevens.

I still get a bit excited when I watch Barbary Stanwyck as Annie Oakley. Maybe it is just the frayed skirt she wears, but more than likely, it is her thorough enjoyment of playing this role that shines through her performance. An actor or actress rises a notch when they really relish the role they are playing. She is perfect as Annie. Preston Foster does a good job in a secondary roles as the romantic interest of Annie. A film I have seen a few times.

Although Stanwyck wasn't the prettiest female star in Hollywood, she possessed a degree of personal magnitism that is rare, "back in the day" or even today. For as much as I love to show off my monumental intelligence regarding film and acting, alas, when it comes to Barbara, I'm at a loss for words... better to just watch one of her films. Three that particularly stand out for me are this one, "Stella Dallas," and "Double Indemnity." All classics.

There are a slew of actors and actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood who had transitioned after their movie careers were over into television. One such actress, Barbara Stanwyck, never thought she would be in a popular TV series playing in her favorite format, the Westerns, when she starred in November 1935's "Annie Oakley." Stanwyck loved the rough-and-tumble atmosphere on the set surrounding her first Western movie she was in. Thirty years later, she found herself on TV playing the part of a wealthy ranching family's matriarch in 1965's 'The Big Valley.' Ironically her Western debut in 1935 is credited as one of cinema's earliest "girl with guns' character.

Although the movie "Annie Oakley" embellishes on the shooting expert's relationship with husband Toby Walker (Preston Foster), there are many nuggets of truth in the RKO-produced biopic. In the late 1800s, the Ohio-born Phoebe Ann Mosey was one of the nation's best sharpshooters, headlining Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Several parallels between Oakley's real husband, expert marksman Frank Butler, and the fictitious Toby Walker are given, including the famous 'skeet' shooting contest between Annie and Butler. The real Annie learned to hunt for her family at an early age. She earned a reputation of shooting much sought-after by local restaurants delectable quails in the head during flight so the meat wouldn't be tainted by the bullets' lead.

In "Annie Oakley," Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas), a representative to Buffalo Bill's show, was so impressed by Annie during that skeet shooting contest he introduced her to the showman. Like the real Bill Cody, he wasn't at all interested in hiring the female shooter until he saw the display of her unique and entertaining sharpshooting. He immediately signed Annie, where she became one of his show's main attractions. Annie eventually branched out beyond Bill's Wild West Show by barnstorming throughout Europe. In one memorable scene based on fact in 1890, the German Kaiser, young Friedrich Wilhelm II, the Emperor responsible for World War One, volunteered during her show to have a lit cigarette shot out of his mouth by Annie. This was the first time, besides her husband, Oakley performed this potentially fatal trick. Shooting her trusty Colt .45 at a distance, she succeeded flawlessly hitting the cigarette from his lips. History may have been different had Annie missed and shot him in the head, sparing millions of lives,.

Several film critics note the similarities between Annie and Stanwyck, including reviewers The Metzinger Sisters, who wrote, "Always a fighter, Stanwyck embodied Annie Oakley's spirit of rugged determination and confidence in one's own abilities, as can be seen in this film." By the time the actress was 28 making "Annie Oakley," she drew accolades on her acting style. "Stanwyck is splendid in the role of Annie Oakley," wrote critic Andre Sennwald of the New York Times. "This is indeed her most striking performance in a long time." It helped that George Stevens, directing his first Western, was handling the production. He would go on to direct such Western classics as 1953 "Shane" and 1956 "Giant."

In his most famous role, Native American Cheyenne actor Richard Thunderbird played Chief Sitting Bull. Film critic Pauline Kael saw how Stevens delicately handled the real-life relationship between the leader of the Sioux and Annie, describing how the director "makes some of the points about race he made later in 'Giant,' but here they're lighter and better. They seem to grow casually out of the American material; the movie feels almost improvised."

Stanwyck's "Annie Oakley" served as a basis for Irving Berlin's 1946 Broadway hit "Annie Get Your Gun," which was made into a 1950 musical film with Betty Hutton as Annie and Howard Keel as Frank Butler. The real Annie died nine years before Stanwyck's screen portrayal. Her grieving husband, Frank, 66, was so despondent he stopped eating and died 18 days later. Reportedly Annie's ashes were placed in one of her trophies and buried inside Frank's coffin.

ANNIE OAKLEY (RKO Radio, 1935), directed by George Stevens, stars Barbara Stanwyck in one of her most notable roles of the 1930s. Being her first movie under the RKO Radio banner, and second of three opposite Preston Foster, this adaptation, from the story by Joseph A. Fields and Ewart Adamson, is more fiction than fact on the real life story of Annie Oakley, female sharpshooter, produced years before the popular Irving Berlin musical of "Annie Get Your Gun" starring Ethel Merman, the 1950 screen version of the same name starring Betty Hutton for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and the basis of a television series (1954-1957) starring Gail Davis.

Rather than starting with the traditional biographical fashion of Annie Oakley as a child who develops her shooting skills at a very young age, the story begins with this opening title: "No fiction is stranger than the actual life of Annie Oakley who came out of a backwoods village half a century ago to astonish the world" before moving to its plot summary. Set at the turn of the century, Annie Oakley (Barbara Stanwyck), a farm girl known for quail shooting, in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her mother (Margaret Armstrong), sister, Susan (Adeline Craig) and little brother, Wesley (Delmar Watson) to participate in the shooting contest against Toby Walker (Preston Foster), "the greatest shot in the whole world." With name mistaken for Andy Oakley, James MacIvor (Andy Clyde), the local hotel owner, finds it impossible for a woman to be an expert marksman. Annie proves her worth at the contest, nearly beating Toby until she purposely misses a shot for Toby to come out the winner. With her skills observed by press agent, Jeff Hogarth (Melvyn Douglas), he convinces Annie to join the troupe of Buffalo Bill's (Moroni Olsen) Wild West Show. Being the only female among cowboys, she becomes Toby's counterpart in sharpshooting events. During their union, Toby teaches Annie some shooting tricks to advance her style. As much as he has fallen in love with her, Toby finds it to be good publicity pretending to be rivals in the public eye. His scheme works all too well when, following a shooting accident that affects his eye vision, Toby goes on with the show. When shooting a coin held by Annie, through misjudgment, injures her hand. This incident loses Toby's standing with the Wild West Show, with Jeff preventing Toby from seeing Annie ever again.

Pert Kelton co-stars as Vera Delmar, Toby's former vaudeville partner; with Chief Thunder Bird as Chief Sitting Bull. Dick Elliott (Major Ned Buntline), Si Jenks, Brandon Hurst and Willie Best can be seen in smaller roles. Being more fiction than historically accurate, ANNIE OAKEY aims to please through much of its 88 minutes. The re-enactment and well-staged Wild West Shows are one of the highlights. Although some could imagine Jean Arthur playing Annie Oakley, Barbara Stanwyck gives it her best shot. Preston Foster's character of Toby Walker, based on the real sharpshooter named Frank Butler, is also properly cast here as is Melvyn Douglas. Some humor involving Indians for comedy purposes is tastefully done. For any accurate accounts not presented in the movie on the real Annie Oakley, simply read books written about her life and career.

Formerly available on video cassette and once shown regularly on American Movie Classics prior to 2001, ANNIE OAKLEY, currently on DVD, can be seen on occasion on Turner Classic Movies. (*** rifles)