#Cattle Annie and Little Britches

[burtlancster]

In one scene, much of which was eventually cut into a collage, the Doolin gang play baseball with bats and balls they have stolen off the train and Plummer had to throw the first pitch. “I had to run to get the ball,” she recalled, “and pick it up and face the camera and throw it. Burt demonstrated it and…He did a Burt Lancaster thing for me. It was beautiful. He just went down for that ball and then his bum rises and then his back follows and it's turning in to go away from the camera and then surprises the camera with a forward movement towards it because you think he's going to go the other way. And then he throws it and it's just to keep the audience entranced. It was extraordinary. He understood time on film, movement and space on film. How to move and how to work in harmony with the camera so that it wasn't actor-y. He was a mover, he could do anything with his body—therefore he understood music! A lot of film actors are cut off from the head down and their bodies just repeat themselves. He made it so the camera can capture the slightest movement. He knew how to do that. This blows your mind because you work with him in front of the camera and then you see it on film and you go, “Whoa! This is a master!” All his films—Birdman—have been impeccably blocked by him.”

— Amanda Plummer on working with Burt Lancaster, excerpt from An American Life by Kate Buford.

[passed-out-real]

Amanda Plummer Filmography Part 1

Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1980)

Daniel (1983)

Static (1985)

Miami Vice (1989)

Tales from the Crypt (1989)

The Fisher King (1991)

Freejack (1992)

So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

Needful Things (1993)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

[michigandrifter]

Burt Lancaster 1913-94

[jozefsquare]

(via Movie Poster - Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Jiří Školník, 1980)

[quietsharpeheart]

Diane Lane in Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981)

[cowboyjen68]

Another random suggestion of something to watch, haha. The youtuber Kaz Rowe recently uploaded a video "exploring the queer history of the old west"!

I booked marked it. I am always interested in, specifically women of the west, but our LGBT history as it relates to the "wild west". I always take "she was a lesbian" with a grain of salt. Because the fact is.. women like Calamity Jane gets called a lesbian all the time but she was most certainly straight, yet shrugged off societal expectations to live as she wanted to.. smoking, drinking, riding and shooting. A very lesbian thing to do LOL

Stories like that of Little Jo and Cattle Annie and her sidekick "Little Britches" amazed me as a young girl and still do to this day. Most likely we will never be sure if they were lesbian or bi, but their stories and women doing their own thing in a world that was rough and even more oppressive for women than now will always inspire me. Plus their clothing choices were spot on to take on a world that didn't want to see them as human.

Thank you for the tip. I look forward to watching it.

This was one where she is on her horse is one of the last photos take of Calamity Jane in 1901. She was in the Wild West show and "retired" soon after to return home her cabin. Her health was failing due to a life time of drinking and smoking and manual labor. She died at 53, my age now, just two years after this. They buried her in a dress. (as far as I can find out). From the time she joined the Union Army until death she was rarely photographed in a dress.

[beesmygod]

Little Britches and Cattle Annie were excellent horse riders and sharpshooters who dressed in men's clothing. The two women evaded law enforcement and became known for their daring pursuits throughout the region. The pair sold whisky to the Osage and Pawnee tribes and engaged in horse theft, operating either together or alone. They alerted other outlaws about the location of law enforcement officers.

little britches is an old timey name for hot pants

[world-of-movies]

DIANE LANE

Unfaithful - Under the Tuscan Sun - Nights in Rodanthe - Paris Can Wait - A Little Romance - Untraceable - Trumbo - A Walk on the Moon - The Glass House - Knight Moves - Touched by Love - Cattle Annie and Little Britches

See more

[burtlancster]

Burt Lancaster and Diane Lane on the set of Cattle Annie and Little Britches, 1981.

[cinemasentries]

Cattle Annie and Little Britches Blu-ray Review: Outlaw Groupies with True Grit                          

 Amanda Plummer amazes in this unjustly neglected Western charmer. 

[pablolf]

Film Journal

“Cattle Annie and Little Britches“ by Lamont Johnson

[notesonfilm1]

In the early 80s, pushing 70, But Lancaster top-lines and gets a star entrance in Cattle Annie and Little Britches. The film, based on a true story, is about Cattle Annie (Amanda Plummer) and Little Britches (Diane Lane) but Burt’s Bob Dooley is the legend, the lodestar, who they want to emulate and with whom they want to join. He’s no longer the romantic lead, but the film’s protagonists have their own non-sexual romance of and with him, and so does the film.

    Mannerisms in actors are usually seen as a negative. That an actor resorts to old tricks and lacks the imagination to inhabit character in different ways. But what if those gestures of body and face, those stances that indicate bursts of energy are part of what audiences love and look forward to in an actor’s performance? In Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Burt’s mannerisms bring up whole eras of audience affection, evoke authority, and are shortcuts to character and a base with which to create something new. He’s too old in the film to play the romantic leading man but the film has its own romance with him, his stardom and his own legend that feeds into that of his character’s. And displaying his body is still part of what he does as an actor and a star, even if pushing 70, it’s now filmed through mist (Pauline Kael said he looked like an old water buffalo). Perhaps that’s why he was still top-billed and headlining in vehicles guided by intelligence and social purpose into his 70s and almost right through the 1980s.

One of the reasons I pay no attention to all the Kael haters is that I vividly remember Kael’s review forty years after I read it, and this was a movie I’d never been able to see up to now. And now that I have seen it and re-read it, I agree with so much of what she says. And she’s so funny saying it. On Rod Steiger: ‘Rod Steiger is probably more contained than he has been in years. The last time I saw him—doing his padre number in “The Amityville Horror”—his spiritual agony was enough to shatter the camera lens.’

    Pauline Kael is worth quoting at length: ‘here are some remarkable performances—Lancaster’s and Diane Lane’s, and, especially, the unheralded, prodigious screen début of Amanda Plummer. (Actually, everything about this picture is unheralded. It was finished over a year ago, but nobody wanted to release it, because a couple of other Westerns had failed. It wasn’t really released: it was just dropped into a Broadway theatre for a week, to plug up a hole before “Outland” arrived.) As Bill Doolin, Lancaster (who made this film before “Atlantic City”) is a gent surrounded by louts—a charmer. When he talks to his gang, he uses the lithe movements and the rhythmic, courtly delivery that his Crimson Pirate of 1952 had when he told his boys to gather ‘round. The great thing about Lancaster is that you can see the face of a stubborn, difficult man—a man who isn’t easy to get along with. He has so much determination that charm doesn’t diminish him. In his scenes with Diane Lane, the child actress who appeared in New York in several of Andrei Serban’s stage productions and who, single-handed, made the film “A Little Romance” almost worth seeing, Lancaster has an easy tenderness that is never overdone, and she is completely inside Jenny’s childish dependency. And when he’s by himself, naked, soaking at the hot springs (where the marshal traps him), he’s a magnificent, sagging old buffalo. Lancaster looks happy in this movie and still looks tough: it’s an unbeatable combination’.

The film itself is charming and a bit ramshackle. It’s unusual to see a film about women’s desires to be outlaws, one set in a period where those dreams were being shut down along with the frontier, and yet the film doesn’t makes those desires as central to the narrative as it should, constantly cutting to the bigger stars, Lancaster himself of course, but also Rod Steiger and Jon Savage — whatever happened to him? He seemed to be everywhere in this period — and even Scott Glenn (why didn’t he become a bigger star? He’s sexy, charismatic and so good here and in practically everything he did in this period). And the questions I ask above in relation to Savage and Glenn are even more worth asking regarding Amanda Plummer, a debut to compare to Hepburn’s writes Kael, and yet it seems American cinema of this period did not have the space for such an electric and original presence. Its loss. But this is a film that allows us to enjoy and mourn the magnitude of that loss.

According to Kate Burford, ‘critics would note that Larry Pizer’s cinematography glowed like a Frederick Remington vision’ (loc 2903), except for the clip of Burt’s entrance I’ve extracted above, where one can barely see anything.

  In her extraordinary book on Lancaster, Kate Burford includes excerpts from a truly illuminating interview with Amanda Plummer on Lancaster’s acting in Cattle Annie that is worth extracting here in its entirety:

A bit of trivia: Steven Ford, son of the American President Gerald, appears in a small role as a man of the law and is very good.

José Arroyo

Cattle Annie and Little Britches (Lamont Johnson, USA, 1981) In the early 80s, pushing 70, But Lancaster top-lines and gets a star entrance in Cattle Annie and Little Britches.

[albertserra]

Watching cattle Annie and little britches

[redderanddeader]

https://girlswithguns.org/cattle-annie-little-britches-fact-fiction/

I am INSPIRED by these Teen Hooligan cowgorls.

[burtlancster]

Burt Lancaster visits with Amanda Plummer backstage at Agnes of God, 1982, © Time Inc.