"You're really Mr. Doolin" -- click to watch scene

 "The only other actress I've ever seen make a movie debut this excitingly, weirdly lyric was Katharine Hepburn.”  -- Pauline Kael

Given its cast, the dismal release of Cattle Annie and Little Britches made no sense. Maybe Universal didn't know how to market a Western about two teenage girls, not even this one inspired by a true story about two girls who in the 1890's briefly joined up with the Doolin-Dalton gang. Completed in 1979, the film was not released until 1981. The principal cast-- Diane Lane, Burt Lancaster, John Savage, Scott Glenn, Rod Steiger and, far from least, Amanda Plummer-- were hitting big at the time in other projects, yet the film came and went with little publicity.

  

Diane Lane-- "Little Britches"-- had been on the cover of Time magazine just two months after the film completed principal photography in June 1979. John Savage, who played Cattle Annie's love interest, had starred in The Deer Hunter, which had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1978, and also in 1979's Hair, the film version of one of the longest-running stage musicals of the 1970's. 

 

Burt Lancaster played the pivotal role of Bill Doolin. When Cattle Annie was released in April 1981, Lancaster was enjoying some of the best reviews of his entire career with Atlantic City, which had been released just a couple of weeks before. By the end of the year, Lancaster would sweep-- for Atlantic City-- the Best Actor awards from the New York Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critcs, and the National Society of Film Critics. (He'd get an Oscar nomination, too.)

 

 

 

 

Atlantic City played i

Amanda Plummer at the 1982 Tony Awards
 as Geraldine Page looks on. 

n several theaters around Manhattan, including one just a few blocks away from the lone, 200-seat theater showing Cattle Annie.  And just a five-minute cab ride away, Cattle Annie herself, Amanda Plummer, was starring live in a new off-Broadway revival of A Taste of Honey. This production was so successful it moved to Broadway within a couple of months, and Plummer would earn a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play when the award season came. Plummer thereby became, in fact, the first actor ever to be nominated for a Tony in both the leading and featured acting-in-a-play categories in the same year. (She won that year as featured actress for Agnes of God.)

 

Cattle Annie didn't first open in New York or Los Angeles. Instead, Universal first released it in smaller markets in the southern United States.  The day it did open in New York, with little advance publicity on May 15, 1981, Vincent Canby raved in The New York Times about the performances of Lancaster and Plummer. Yet the same scrawny ad that ran on opening day ran two days later in the Times Sunday edition:

 

Two days after Vincent Canby's rave, the ads for Cattle Annie (circled in yellow) still did not publicize the performances. The full-page ad for Improper Channels was on the very next page. 

 

 

Canby had pointed out that Plummer was the daughter of actors Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes. Their prominence in the New York stage-theater world might have filled, from curiosity alone, the 200 seats at the lone Manhattan movie theater showing Cattle Annie -- a theater Michael Sragow would later describe in Rolling Stone magazine as a basement theater with a television-sized screen.  

 

Cattle Annie closed in Manhattan after a week. Had the film held on for two more weeks, Pauline Kael's review in The New Yorker, might have generated enough interest to keep the film around. (A few months later, Canby was able to rescue Stevie, another independent film with a delayed release, starring Glenda Jackson.) 

 

Kael praised the "remarkable performances-- Lancaster's and Lane's, and especially the unheralded, prodigious screen debut of Amanda Plummer," who was "scarily brilliant." Kael concluded, "The only other actress I've ever seen make a debut this excitingly, weirdly lyric was Katharine Hepburn." Hepburn's film debut (in A Bill of Divorcement) had been almost 50 years earlier, in 1932.  In an interview in 2018, Plummer herself recalled Kael's review, after all those years, as "amazing." 

Cattle Annie continued to play sporadically around the country throughout 1981, during which time at least two other critics gave it prominent national press. In a feature spanning several pages in Rolling Stone magazine in the summer, Michael Sragow praised the film and performances, and decried its distribution. In the fall, when the film made it to Chicago, Roger Ebert gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up on Sneak Previews (with Gene Siskel), which by then had become a hit for PBS. (Siskel, however, did not concur with a thumbs-up.) Ebert followed up a few months later by making Cattle Annie one of his selections for a special episode of Sneak Previews devoted to 1981's overlooked treasures.

 

The story had been inspired by the true-life story of two girls who ran away in Oklahoma Territory in the 1890's and became outlaws. For awhile, they joined up with the Doolin-Dalton gang. Robert Ward and David Eyre wrote the story from Ward's novel of the same name. Scott Glenn, featured in Urban Cowboy in 1980, played Bill Dalton, and Rod Steiger, who had had a big hit in 1979 with The Amityville Horror, played Marshall Bill Tilghman, who pursued the gang. Lamont Johnson directed, Rupert Hitzig and others produced.

"I'll have my pay!" -- Cattle Annie demands respect. Click text to watch scene

Amanda Plummer famously kicked off Pulp Fiction in 1994 as Honey Bunny, holding up a diner with her "Pumpkin", Tim Roth. Had Quentin Tarantino seen the scene in Cattle Annie and Little Britches where Annie whips out a pistol and exclaims : "Open these doors or I'll blow your brains out!"?

Click here to watch scenes

 

....although Annie is more heroic than Honey Bunny.

Roger Ebert played this scene, twice, when he featured Cattle Annie on Sneak Previews, irst in October 1981 when the film played in Chicago and again a few months later, on a special episode devoted to 1981's forgotten treasures.

Her first film role after Cattle Annie was a small but unforgettable role in The World According to Garp in 1982, as the pivotal character Ellen James. Then came a supporting role as Timothy Hutton's sister in Daniel in 1983. Not long after that, critic Stephen Schiff wrote in Vanity Fair,

“…. 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?”

Hollywood did not do nearly as much as Broadway did. Even as Cattle Annie was fading from view in 1981, Plummer was starring in a revival of A Taste of Honey, which she followed up in 1982 with Agnes of God. For these plays, she became the first performer to be nominated for Tony awards in two categories in the same year-- for Best Actress for A Taste of Honey and Best Supporting Actress for Agnes of God-- winning for the latter. Along with her co-star Geraldine Page, she would be passed over for the film version of Agnes of God, but instead she would star with Jessica Tandy in a 1983 revival of The Glass Menagerie and with Peter O'Toole in a 1987 revival of Pygmalion-- for which again she would be nominated for a Best Actress Tony. In 1985, Off-Broadway, she had created the role of Beth in Sam Shephard's A Lie of the Mind. 

In 1991, she teamed with Robin Williams again, as his girlfriend in The Fisher King. Kael, who by then had retired from regular writing, in interviews singled out the four principals of The Fisher King-- the others were Jeff Bridges and Mercedes Ruehl-- for performances she regretted not getting to write about. They were "really extraordinary" with "great teamwork" -- and Williams and Plummer "were like boy-and-girl Marx brothers." (As quoted in Conversations with Pauline Kael, edited by Will Brantley, pp. 142-3, 173.)

She also had significant roles in independent movies, such as Static (1986), Needful Things (1993), Butterfly Kiss (1995), and Freeway (1996). She appeared with the Brat Pack in 1985's The Hotel New Hampshire.  Her television resume is impressive, with a trio of Emmy awards for Best Supporting Actress in a movie or miniseries or Best Guest Actress in a series.

In 2012, she was in the huge Hollywood hit The Hunger Games, with Jennifer Lawrence. 

Distribution Postscript

In 2013, the Boston Society of Film Critics selected Cattle Annie as one of the Best Rediscoveries of 2013, after Cattle Annie had played at a Burt Lancaster retrospective in Cambridge.

In April 2020, Cattle Annie and Little Britches was released on DVD.

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 

 Postscript

Note: Because Blogger displays posts with the most recent publishing date first, I have set the publication date of this post years before the actual date I'm publishing it (November 15, 2020), so that it will display as the last post on this blog.

    I met Amanda Plummer on the sidewalk in Austin, Texas, around 2011, I believe. She by herself outside the Paramount Theater on Congress Avenue-- I was excited and I approached her, and she was really friendly. I said, "I've been a fan of yours since Cattle Annie!" She seemed genuinely pleased and said, "Oh, that's such a long time!" I blushed, because it quickly occurred to me that I had first seen Cattle Annie only years after it originally came out. But I couldn't think of how to tell her that, so I just smiled and said, "It's really nice to meet you." We shook hands, and I walked away, thinking that she was so nice I could have asked her for coffee. Her face was so open!