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| "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 is baffling. Between its completion in the summer of 1979 and its release in the spring of 1981, the principal cast members all scored big in other projects. Diane Lane-- Little Britches-- was on the cover of Time magazine just two months after Cattle Annie completed principal photography in June 1979. Burt Lancaster, who played outlaw Bill Doolin, received some of the best reviews of his career, just three weeks before Cattle Annie was released in Manhattan, for Atlantic City-- a performance for which he would go on to sweep major critics awards and score an Oscar nomination for Best Actor of 1981.  |
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| Geraldine Page looks on as Amanda Plummer is about to win a Tony award. |
Cattle Annie played in Manhattan for just one week, in a single 200-seat theater-- "in a basement room with a TV-size screen," according to Michael Sragow a few weeks later in Rolling Stone magazine. The day Cattle Annie was released in Manhattan, on May 15, 1981, Vincent Canby raved about Lancaster's and Plummer's performances in The New York Times-- but the scrawny ads for the film, even those in the Times, did not highlight the performers. Had the film held on for two more weeks, Pauline Kael's review in The New Yorker, might have made it a local hit, the way Canby was able to rescue Stevie, another independent film with a delayed release in New York, a few months later with his championing of Glenda Jackson's performance.
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Two days after Vincent Canby's rave, the ads for Cattle Annie (circled in yellow) still did not publicize the performances. |
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. Plummer herself, recalling Kael's review years later, in an interview in 2018, described the review as "amazing."
Universal may just not have known how to market a Western about two teenage girls-- not even one inspired by a true story from the 1890's about two runaways who briefly joined up with the Doolin-Dalton outlaw gang.
Cattle Annie was completed in 1979 but not released until 1981, at a time when the principal cast-- Diane Lane, Burt Lancaster, John Savage, Scott Glenn, Rod Steiger and, far from least, Amanda Plummer-- were hitting 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, the Academy Award winner for Best Picture of 1978, and also in 1979's Hair, the film version of one of the longest-running stage musicals of the 1960's and 70's.
Burt Lancaster played the pivotal role of Bill Doolin. In April 1981, just a few weeks before Cattle Annie was released, Lancaster had received some of the best reviews of his career for Atlantic City, for which he would go on to sweep the Best Actor awards of the New York Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics, and the National Society of Film Critics. (He'd get an Oscar nomination for it, too.)
Cattle Annie and Little Britches played for only a week in Manhattan-- in a multiplex theater in Times Square "in a basement room with a TV-size screen," according to Michael Sragow in Rolling Stone magazine. Yet just a five-minute cab ride away, Amanda Plummer-- Cattle Annie herself-- was starring live in a revival of A Taste of Honey, a production which would earn her would earn a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a
Play-- making her, 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, on May 15, 1981, with little advance publicity, 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. (Cattle Annie's ad below is circled in yellow-- compared, for example, to the full-page ad for Improper Channels 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 Times Square movie theater showing Cattle Annie.
After a week, Cattle Annie closed in Manhattan. Had it 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, with his rave for Glenda Jackson's performance)
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.) Plummer
herself, in an interview in 2018, recalled Kael's review after all those years, describing it as "amazing."
Cattle Annie played sporadically around the country throughout 1981, and it got prominent national press from at least two other critics. The afore-mentioned Michael Sragow's feature spanned several pages in the July 23, 1981, edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Sragow praised the film and performances and decried Universal's distribution. The film made it to Chicago in the fall, and Roger
Ebert gave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up on Sneak Previews, then a hit on PBS. (Ebert's co-host, Gene Siskel, however, did not concur with
a thumbs-up.) Ebert followed up a few months later by declaring Cattle Annie one of 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 briefly 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.
