"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.