MOVIE RECAP — CALAMITY JANE
The Western musical is among the most gleefully delirious of musical subgenres: if there is an inherent surrealism in a cinematic universe where people will spontaneously explain their feelings by bursting into songs that everyone knows the words to, and dance routines that everyone knows the steps to, that surrealism is heightened when the singers and dancers are hard-bitten, rowdy frontiersman, living amid the lawless violence of the Old West. It’s insane, which is why it’s so great.
Here we start with the Deadwood Stage, where the ferocious tomboy Calamity Jane guards the wellbeing of the passengers with her six-shooter, her jaunty hat, her adorable ponytail, and her angelic voice. Historically speaking, Doris Day is probably the precise opposite of Calamity Jane, but this is NOT a historically-minded movie. You can tell by the way nobody gets murdered in Deadwood, Wild Bill Hickok isn’t ugly as sin, and Calamity herself never once has sex for money.
Calamity Jane was made because Jack Warner couldn’t get the rights to “Annie Get Your Gun” for Doris Day to star in. So he came up with the idea of sanitising Calamity Jane instead, and cast Howard Keel from “Annie” as Wild Bill, so everyone would find it hauntingly familiar.
The weird thing is that after she’s sung “Whip Crackaway” on the way into town, and then sung her little song about all the purchases she’s delivering, she goes into the saloon and sings, “Introducin’ Henry Miller”. But she’s singing to the men of Deadwood — they already know Henry. And they know Calamity. Are they finding it enlightening that Calamity and Henry are very good friends? Or that Calamity and Bill are very good friends? You have to assume the townsfolk find this segment of the extended opening sequence is sort of superfluous.
Now a brief snapshot of Francis Fryer, the actor who Henry Miller thought was an actress and boy will there be shenanigans over this later. Back to the bar, where Calamity spins some ripe bullshit about the thousands of Indians she’s slaughtered because it’s 1950 and that’s still considered a noble profession for a respectable woman. Then all the cowboys start creaming their jeans over a cigarette card of Adelaide Adams. “She’s a great actress,” says Wild Bill, although later on we find out she’s actually not, she’s just a really boring vaudeville singer. I guess that’s what people think is acting in Deadwood.
Henry and Francis have an awkward conversation and I notice a weird resemblance in mannerism between Francis Fryer and French Stewart. If they remake this movie, French Stewart should play Francis Fryer. If French Stewart is still alive. I wouldn’t know, really.
Here are some wounded cowboys who were interrupted by a Sioux war party just while they were in the middle of stealing their country. They report that the Indians have maybe killed Lieutenant Gilmartin or maybe not. Calamity is devastated because she is in love with Lieutenant Gilmartin, although she dare not speak her love aloud for fear people think she’s gone soft or has a fetish for incredibly dull men.
There goes Calamity, riding off to take on the bloodthirsty Injuns. The native American-white conflict is a pretty minor subplot here, but it is made pretty clear that some Indians are just nutjobs who want to kill white people for no reason. Although also there are some Indians who hang around in Deadwood and seem to get along pretty well with everyone, so that’s a blow for harmony I guess.
After dry-humping Danny Gilmartin all the way back to Deadwood, Calamity spins some more bullshit and you wonder why she bothers, given the actual truth about her adventures is pretty awesome. It’s not like she looks like a pussy if you tell the truth — she’s still a badass. Drop the lies, Calamity.
“Why don’t you ever fix your hair?” Jesus Bill, sexist much? And hasn’t he noticed that Calamity’s hair is actually really cute? That little ponytail etc.
Calamity is angry at Danny because he’s jerking off over Adelaide Adams and she considers him her property and is strongly anti-porn. She’s the Melinda Tankard Reist of the Old West.
Now the drag act. Francis Fryer comes on stage as FrancEs Fryer, and all the men cheer for this super-sexy woman, and only Calamity knows it’s really a man, because she’s a woman, and she’s got woman-dar I guess. Men have no woman-dar: stick a dude in a dress and their brains just switch right off.
Hey, I think that guy in the corner is one of Spats Columbo’s goons in Some Like It Hot! Bad casting — he’s got much more of a gangster face than a cowboy face.
Francis sings and eventually he gets right into it, because it’s going well and all the dudes want to get into his corsets, because they live in a town with only one woman and she dresses like a man anyway, and they are so desperate they will bang anything, even a terrible singer who looks like Jeremy Piven. Then a trombone takes his wig off, and outrage ensues. I think Fryer should’ve brazened it out, really: actresses must’ve worn wigs too back then. But I guess the crowd was already furious because anyone with short hair is a man to them. Which is weird too, because the only woman in their town has short hair. There are some complex things going on in these people’s heads.
Idiot Calamity, promising to bring Adelaide Adams to Deadwood. She’ll never come to Deadwood, she’s a big star! Oh Calamity, always getting yourself into scrapes: it’s no wonder Wild Bill Hickok is being so sarcastic at you. Of course Wild Bill was notorious for his sarcasm: they called him the most ironic gun in the West.
This of course causes Calamity and Bill to sing a duet about how much they hate each other. It’s pretty good how even though they’re furious at each other, they respect songcraft enough to stick to the same tune and verse/chorus structure.
Also, Calamity tells Bill, “You can go to Philadelphia”, and she makes that sound REALLY vitriolic. Like, that’s a seriously sick burn in Deadwood times. Bill replies by calling her ugly, which is stupid because everyone can see that she’s gorgeous, even when wearing dirty brown pants. But anyway the song is really just a “we’re gonna fuck later” song.
Is Calamity really that confident she can find Adelaide using only her cigarette picture? Was her plan just to wander the streets of Chicago till she found the woman who matched the picture? No it wasn’t — I mean duh, she goes to the theatre where Adams is playing. So what’s this “I got her cigareet picture” nonsense? Just making yourself sound like an idiot.
Speaking of which, Calamity is a real halfwit in Chicago. Staggering around like Mork from Ork: women in dresses! Shop windows! Such bizarre and inexplicable sights! She actually pulls a gun on a wooden statue of an Indian — like because she’s from the country she can’t tell the difference between people and pieces of wood.
Adelaide Adams’s act is shit. Why is she so famous? She sucks. Not as badly as every act that we see put on in Deadwood during the movie, but Chicago audiences surely have higher standards. This is just garbage. All these freaks clapping: I guess it’s because back then men would kill to see a woman’s thigh, and Adelaide was their own chance.
After the show we learn that Adelaide is a complete egotistical bitch, but we won’t get much of a chance to explore her deepseated personality flaws: she’ll be gone from this movie in two minutes. And here we meet Adams’s dresser Katie, a young woman who looks nothing like Adelaide Adams but who Calamity will mistake for Adelaide Adams because even though she has a photo of Adelaide Adams to refer to, Calamity is, as established, a moron from the country. This whole movie can be summed up with one sentence: “Calamity Jane is a cretin.”
So Calamity finds a woman who doesn’t look like Adelaide Adams singing a song in a voice that doesn’t sound like Adelaide Adams, but since she’s wearing Adelaide Adams’s costume, sure, go ahead, drag her back to Inbredville with you.
It’s also pretty funny how Katie thinks Calamity is a man because she’s wearing pants — as long as a person is wearing pants, their face and voice and obvious breasts mean nothing and they must be a man. Katie is definitely dumb enough to fit in with the folk of Deadwood.
Time to kill some Indians, Calam. But it’s a funny Indian-killing, because it causes Katie to get shaken around in a comical fashion inside the stagecoach.
Everyone in Deadwood has been obsessing over the picture of Adelaide Adams for months, but naturally none of them notice that the woman who just turned up looks nothing like her either. Especially Wild Bill and Boring Lieutenant Danny, who pretty much try to finger her the second she steps off the coach. The only man who isn’t fooled is Francis Fryer, because he’s met Adelaide Adams and also has a brain. Not THAT good a brain: he actually has to think about it for a bit before he decides that this obvious impostor is not actually the woman he has met in the recent past.
Like most people, killing Indians puts Calamity in the mood for singing, so she prances about the saloon and lets the boys know how amazing Chicago is, but also that she prefers Deadwood, even though everything she sings about makes it clear that Chicago is objectively better and everyone in Deadwood is wasting their lives in a godforsaken hellhole.
Why hasn’t Henry Miller ever asked Calamity Jane to perform in his theatre? Every time she comes in, she puts on a big musical number for free anyway.
Come on, even cowboys know what baseball is, Calamity.
Francis, just tell him, for god’s sake. At least give Henry a chance to get out of town now.
Why is Francis even still in Deadwood? Nobody wants him there — they only want performers who offer the possibility of an accidental nipple slip.
Before Katie comes on stage, Francis actually says, “Good luck Katie”. So he’s not only met Adelaide, he’s met Katie herself before too. Still, it took him a few minutes to decide whether there was some funny business going on.
I don’t know why the Sioux would actually let Wild Bill hold their baby, just to fulfil a bet. It’s none of their business.
Katie sucks. She sucks total donkey balls. “She didn’t sing like that in Chicagee,” says Calamity, who mispronounces words on purpose. But actually she DID sing like that in Chicagee, and Calamity heard her singing like that, and failed somehow to pick up on the fact the singing she heard sounded completely different to the singing the woman on stage had done.
Katie sucks at singing but she sucks even more at scamming — she can’t even get through one verse before confessing the whole thing, and now Calamity has to save the lives of the entire theatre administration and staff with her second rousing speech of the movie so far and also by shooting her gun and kicking a guy, and then she gets lassoed by Bill and it’s all just a shambles. Calamity is given an assist by Lieutenant Danny Dullmartin who chimes in to say he doesn’t care that he’s been lied to because he wants to fuck Katie just as much as he wanted to fuck Adelaide.
Fortunately the drunks and hired killers of Deadwood are a reasonable bunch, so Katie gets the chance to continue her performance full of confidence and sass, proving that whether impersonating someone else or not, she sucks. Nobody cares, because she’s almost falling out of her costume and when she does cartwheels there’s a chance they swear they saw a flash of vag.
Calamity is wearing a different hat in this scene to her cool Indian scout hat. I prefer the scout hat myself.
Oh, it’s Adelaid. No “e”. Oh well.
Everything is in really great shape in Deadwood, everyone is happy and productive and nobody wants to kill Calamity anymore and they’ve all come to terms with the hideous deception practised upon them. Joy reigns supreme in the Old West as Katie moves in with Calamity for extremely vaguely-defined reasons, and Wild Bill sings a sappy song about his sexual needs to a painting of Katie. This song contains the line “When I strut about like a Sonny Jim”, which I bet Howard Keel got paid extra to sing.
I think maybe Bill thinks the painting of Katie is actually the real woman, and he’s making a declaration of love to her. Understandable since it’s pretty unfeasible such a painting of a woman who just arrived in town yesterday could possibly already be finished.
Katie is really as much of a judgmental cow as Adelaid was — looking down her nose at Calamity’s house.
I mean her house is fine. It’s FINE. Katie was, until yesterday, a maid — exactly what sort of luxury is she pretending she’s used to?
Here begins the song “A Woman’s Touch”, which Calamity and Katie sing while engaging in a Changing Rooms-style montage. It’s just assumed that Calamity has failed as a woman by not keeping her house in a suitably feminine condition. Maybe she had more important things to do, Katie: like killing Indians?
Is it really necessary to paint “Calam and Katie” on the front door? That feels like overkill.
Also, Katie apparently forced Calamity to get a new wardrobe as well. Does Calamity want to wear dresses? Who knows? Katie doesn’t give a fuck what Calamity wants — she’s fucking well GOING to wear dresses. Despite their total unsuitability for Indian-killing. Katie’s going to ruin her career with this rubbish.
The next scene is Wild Bill Hickok playing cards: wouldn’t it be brilliant if it turned out to be a historically accurate recreation of his real-life death? Unfortunately it’s not, it’s just the prelude to Bill and Lieutenant Sleeping Pillmartin riding like the clappers to Calam and Katie’s house so they can turkey-slap each other over the latter, not realising that Calam recently started wearing dresses and therefore now possesses value as a human being. Katie tries to convince them that Calamity is now a real babe, but Calamity fell in mud on her way home so the two dudes are turned right off, assuming that she is always covered in mud or is some kind of terrifying mud monster or something.
There’s also this really cool little snarky exchange here, where Bill accuses Danny of wasting taxpayers’ money by straying away from the fort for his booty calls, and Danny retorts by pointing out that Bill is a mass murderer. I like how even in this sanitised musical version of the Old West, where Bill Hickok is a handsome clean-cut heartthrob, they remind us that he is also a cold-blooded killer, and then carry on with the romcom like it ain’t no thing.
Katie pulls some sneaky bullshit with the firewood, and they fight over Katie, and they draw straws and Danny wins the chance to take Katie to the dance where they can bore the shit out of each other, and Bill loses, which means he has to take the nauseatingly ugly Doris Day to the dance. While they’re arguing, Bill threatens to murder Danny, which is fair enough because it’s the Musical West.
Then Calamity shows up covered in mud and Bill’s like ewwwwwwwwwwwww what kind of woman gets mud on herself?
On the ride to the dance, Calamity and Bill talk about how beautiful the hills are, and Calamity mentions how it’s no wonder the Indians fight so hard to hold onto such a gorgeous country. Which you’d think might trigger a bit of self-awareness in them, as they realise, hey, what the fuck are we doing killing all these Indians so we can steal their country from them? It doesn’t, though — they just reflect briefly on how justified their enemies are, and then they start singing about the hills.
To be honest, as the movie shows it, the Indians don’t fight all that hard anyway. The ones who don’t spend their time hanging around the Deadwood theatre mostly just ride casually behind the stagecoach up to the point when Calamity shoots one of them, and then they ride away. Maybe they know the Black Hills aren’t really all that great.
Check out Wild Bill’s jaw dropping when he sees Calamity in her dress.
Like he was expecting her to come to the dance in a boiler suit or something. And every man at the dance wants to dance with her, because the only difference between the ugliest woman in town and the most beautiful is a dress. Nobody gives a shit about the other women now, even though they all went to just as much trouble to dress up. Except Dull Danny — he’s totally still into Katie, and she is really attracted to his inability to move his facial muscles, and he gives her a stiff, wooden kiss in the garden, which makes Calamity shot Katie’s glass out of her hand, which honestly everyone takes really calmly considering how lethally dangerous it was.
The main issues with Calamity’s big tantrum here are, firstly, that she seems to be claiming ownership over Lieutenant Mogadon even though she’s never had even the beginnings of a relationship with him, and secondly, that gunplay is just an insane overreaction by any standards. As is going to the theatre in the middle of Katie’s performance — in which Francis Fryer is participating, because despite being a famous and accomplished actor who could be performing in major theatres in large cities, he’s apparently decided to just hang out in Deadwood for the rest of his life — and telling her to get out of town or else Calamity will pop a cap in her ass.
It all goes pear-shaped when Katie shoots Calamity’s glass out of her hand, except she didn’t, Wild Bill did, in order to teach Calamity a fairly nebulous lesson about how despicable it is to act like a woman. Like, he explicitly tells her this: he accuses her of “female thinking”, which is just the absolute worst thing in the world. Jealousy is something caused by vaginas, and Wild Bill always thought Calamity had overcome her vagina, but apparently not. Though he does make a good point about her actions not being calculated to actually get the tedious lieutenant to want to bang her, while sadly neglecting to point out that the lieutenant sucks anyway. Then Calamity and Bill admit that it’s actually each other’s spurs they want to be knocking, and hooray, true love etc and Calamity puts on a snazzy pantsuit and sings her hit single.
But obviously there is still the matter of the entire town’s intense loathing of her to deal with, because although Calamity has dedicated her entire life to protecting this town and has saved its residents’ lives countless times, she also made the song-and-dance lady leave, so she must be shunned forever and forced to listen to Plastic Dan Gilmartin read her a really passive-aggressive note from Katie.
“She was the most real person in Deadwood,” says Henry Miller, and honestly what the fuck? This little con artists slithers into town, sings a couple of songs, and suddenly nothing else matters except her happiness. All these gunfighters and cutthroats and rough-riders suffering clinical depression because the singer they just met about a week ago got a stick up her butt and pouted off to Chicago.
Anyway all’s well that ends well because Calamity rides like a lunatic in pursuit of the stagecoach and tells Katie all about how Bill set her straight re: women being the absolute worst, and now that she’s accepted the innate inferiority of her sex, she can marry Bill and Katie can marry her Ken doll and the balance of traditional gender roles is re-established.
Bill sings the song to Calamity that he sung to the painting of Katie, which is pretty insulting, but too late, they’re already married, and the two happy couples ride off into the distance, leaving the town defenceless in the face of the Sioux hordes that will no doubt soon be bearing down on it.
Anyway Wikipedia indicates probably very little of this actually happened.
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