Movie Review: Annie (1982)

An adaptation of the hit stage musical, Annie is bloated and off-target.

The setting is New York City during the Great Depression. Annie (Aileen Quinn) is a mischievous 10 year old orphan whose dreams of reuniting with her parents help her survive squalid conditions in the orphanage run by the obnoxious Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett). Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney) is a Republican billionaire in search of good publicity, and his secretary Grace Farrell (Anne Reinking) selects Annie as the lucky orphan to spend a week at Warbucks' massive mansion.

Annie brightens up the house, enchants the servants and melts Warbucks' heart. He offers a reward for her real parents to come forward, sparking a frenzy as desperate scammers make false claims.  But Miss Hannigan's con-artist brother Rooster (Tim Curry) and his girlfriend Lily (Bernadette Peters) devise an elaborate ruse to falsely claim Annie as their daughter and make off with the money.

Somehow, producer Ray Stark tapped 76 year old veteran John Huston to direct Annie. Working from a Carol Sobieski script, this was Huston's first and ultimately only musical. Totally bamboozled by the child-oriented material and the genre, Huston delivers a bumbling and plodding adaptation. The production values are decent, but otherwise the song and dance numbers are listless, the dialogue scenes stiff, and the performances grating. A joyous, upbeat and inspiring stage show is turned into a laborious chore clocking in at an interminable 128 minutes.

Some of the decisions by Huston and Sobieski are simply baffling. A large chunk of Greta Garbo's Camille, a film about courtesans, is inserted into Annie, but only after a glitzy show by the dancing girls of Radio City Music Hall. And not one but two bodyguards are created for Warbucks to help set up a garish chase ending complete with a helicopter rescue. Meanwhile, the song Tomorrow, which is the highlight of the entire show, is given away entirely during the opening credits and then half-baked into an inert scene with President Roosevelt (Edward Herrmann).

Aileen Quinn gives her all but gets no help from Huston, while Burnett, Curry and Peters overact as though there is no difference between stage and screen. Worse of all is Albert Finney, a British actor plonked into the role of the prototypical American tycoon, and understandably bemused into irrelevance.

Shouty and tone deaf, Annie hits all the wrong notes.

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Movie Review: The Jerk (1979)

An attempted comedy about an idiot, The Jerk is simply awful. Making fun of a moron is bad enough. Not even succeeding in being funny about it is just distressing. Steve Martin can consider himself most fortunate that his career somehow survived this foul-smelling turkey, a box-office hit that proved the occasional profitability of the braindead denominator.

Navin Johnson (Martin) is a white man, raised by a black family but too much of a simpleton to realize that he must have been adopted. He leaves home to strike it on his own in life, and finds jobs at a gas station and then a travelling carnival. His misadventures include becoming the target of a crazed sniper, the stud lover for a motorcycle stuntwoman, and striking it obscenely rich by inventing a nose support for eyeglasses. He also meets and falls in love with the sweet Marie (Bernadette Peters). Clueless enough to get into all sorts of trouble, Johnson is also oblivious enough to walk out of every conundrum almost unscathed.

The Jerk is not slapstick, it's not witty, it's not tongue in cheek, and it's not satirical. It's simply dumbfounding in its lack of any sharp edge or actual meaningful comedy. Any laughs generated are plain uncomfortable, mostly consisting of laughing at someone rather than with him. Director Carl Reiner gives the film a decrepit look that makes it appear older than its era, and Steve Martin, who co-wrote the screenplay, simply tries too hard at playing the fool and achieves no refinement.

Only Peters emerges with any credit, adequately delivering her persona of breathlessly soft-spoken passion.

The Jerk is an impudent clown re-directing his humour from children to adults, and wondering why the big red nose is somehow not so funny.

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