Reviews

Pauline Kael:

“…. The fiercely strong Annie (Amanda Plummer), who's about sixteen, shames the men and inspires them--almost catastrophically--to try to become what she had imagined them to be…. You don't find out what brought the girls together, or what their earlier lives were--what the fantasy played off--but there are some remarkable performances--Lancaster's and Diane Lane's, and, especially, the unheralded, prodigious screen debut of Amanda Plummer….

“Young Amanda Plummer gives a scarily brilliant performance: her Annie could teach Lucas and Spielberg a few things about tomboy gumption. Annie is scrawny, a guttersnipe showoff and dreamer, but there's also a woman there, with a spark of womanly greatness. When Annie saves the gang from a posse by stampeding a herd of cattle and stands among the running beasts with her arms outstretched, if your mind clicks to the tableau in Women in Love, with Glenda Jackson poised, dancing in front of a herd of swaying bullocks, Amanda Plummer doesn't suffer from the comparison.   Whatever this young actress does here she does in character--whether it's the exaltation as she stands among the cattle or the resolve she show when the outlaws seem cowardly.
Her gaze is steely--implacable. She could burn holes in you with those eyes. Even her romance with one of the outlaws, played by John Savage, is fully felt--on her side, at least. No doubt the director guided this young actress, but her spirit is so distinctive it has to be all hers. It takes a few minutes to adjust to her face and voice, because you can see both of her parents (Tammy Grimes and Christopher Plummer) in her and you can certainly hear her mother's inflections, whcih have never seemed to belong to any country or class but only to the theatre, and to oddity. The daughter uses those inflections with a special vehemence: Annie is a taut young girl whose hoarse voice gives her raw emotions away. The only other actress I've ever seen make a movie debut this excitingly, weirdly lyric was Katharine Hepburn.”

-- June 8, 1981 (first printed in The New Yorker's June 15 edition)

Katherine Hepburn's debut had been in 1932's A Bill of Divorcement, almost 50 years earlier. Kael at that time would have been 13 years old. 

In an interview after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 Oldenburg International Film Festival, Amanda Plummer was asked about Kael's review. After all those years, she recalled:

"That was one of the most amazing reviews. It was my first picture. And, Pauline Kael wrote the most amazing review about me. It seemed to go on and on and on ... and I was like: 'Are you kidding me? Wow!' This thing she said, that's the quotable catchphrase, everything else was like: 'God! This woman knows actors!' The way she wrote... And, then, I started reading more of her reviews... she must've read and seen so much. She talked like someone who knew what she was talking about. And, she did! And, I'd met her once. And, she was a really cool lady! But, that review was the first film review I had and I was just floored by it. It was out of this world!... [E]verything she reviewed about me, she really like me, which, I guess, is extraordinary, you know! Extraordinary because I came into the business knowing that I was extremely different, knowing that it wasn't going to be easy because I have a different feeling that what I see mostly in U.S. Cinema, but with the foreign Cinema, I thought: 'This is what I watched a lot of, films from other countries and lands and languages, and I love their works so much' and I knew I was different. So, I was lucky to have one critic in America liking me!"

Fade to Her, February 10, 2018, "Encounter #29" 

 (Kael's wasn't quite Plummer's first film review, but even so.)

Vincent Canby:

“It has two major assets—one old, one new—in the performances of Burt Lancaster, playing a tired desperado with the kind of laid-back, comic assurance that comes only after a lifetime on the screen, and Amanda Plummer, the daughter of Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes, who is making a smashing film debut.

“Miss Plummer, who just received rave reviews in an Off-Broadway revival of 'A Taste of Honey,' is not conventionally pretty, but she’s a most winning, appealing new screen presence. Even when her accent doesn’t quite match the character, she’s marvelous as Annie, the tough, common-sensible, foul-mouthed ghetto kid from the East who bums her way West....

-- New York Times, May 15, 1981

Canby was the main critic for The New York Times, one of the most influential reviewers in America, and his review was printed the day Cattle Annie opened in New York. But even in the Sunday edition two days later, Cattle Annie still had a scrawny ad. It's on the left; I'm including the following page's full-page ad for Improper Channels for comparison:

Stanley Kauffmann

“Amanda Plummer, who makes her screen debut as one of the girls, has neither the brilliance of her father Christopher Plummer nor the wind-up-toy charm of her mother Tammy Grimes….”

 -- The New Republic, June 6, 1981

 

It's curious that Kauffmann bothered to review Cattle Annie-- it had already left Manhattan, although it was still trickling through the rest of the country. My guess is because Kauffmann was also a theater reviewer who recognized the importance of actors, and wanted to note the film debut of the daughter of Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes. Their prominence in the New York theater world is another reason you would think Universal would have done more to publicize Cattle Annie when it played in New York. 

Producer Howard Zitzig, who cast Plummer as a Cattle Annie, was a friend of Tammy Grimes. The casting was announced in 1979 by Bob Thomas in a syndicated AP new story, and it was reported that Plummer had been an avid horse rider since she was just five years old, experience that would serve her well as Cattle Annie. 

Michael Sragow:

“…. [Lamont Johnson has] proved more adept than any other American director at treating adolescence as it is: a dangerous intersection between childhood and adulthood. He's also gotten terrific performances from young talents like Jeff Bridges (The Last American Hero) and even from nonactresses like Margaux and Mariel Hemingway (Lipstick). Here, Johnson gets to work with two fabulous fledlings: Diane Lane as Little Britches and Amanda Plummer as the stronger, more cantankerous Cattle Annie.

“In her motion-picture debut, Plummer makes the fiery, indelible impression of a branding iron. She's got powerhouse guttural flair. Her stare is riveting--and so's her hellcat growl. In  contrast, Lane's Little Britches is cotton soft and gives the movie gentleness…. Without Lane's skillfully shy, halting performance, we wouldn't appreciate the innocence the girls are leaving behind.”

-- Rolling Stone, July 23?, 1982

Stephen Schiff:

"....What, I wonder, will Hollywood do with Amanda Plummer, who is scrawny and homely and one of the most talented actresses the movies have ever seen?"

-- "The 80's Generation", Vanity Fair, late 1983/early 1984

Steve Vineberg: 

"Annie has a self-dramatizing bravado, and she’s a life embracer; the men try to laugh at her, but her idolatry of them and her take-no-prisoners resolve and her insistence that they live up to the image she has of them from Ned Buntline’s books make it hard for them to do so.... Besides, she’s inventive and thinks on her feet. When Sheriff Tilghman (Rod Steiger) shows up to capture the gang, Annie opens a gate to release a head of steer that get between Tilghman’s posse and the outlaws, so the lawmen can’t see their targets. Earning her nickname, Plummer’s Annie perches on the corral fence, waving her arms theatrically, as if she were choreographing a ballet. She’s wildly eccentric but vibrant and singular, like Katharine Hepburn as the gawky and gallant Jo March in George Cukor’s 1933 film of Little Women or like Julie Harris, at twenty-six, as the twelve-year-old Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding."

-- "Neglected Gem #48," criticsatlarge.ca, November 2, 2013