"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.