Annie Get Your Gun

It was to have been Judy Garland directed by the tasteful Charles Walters, but the lady was in one of her problem patches, and this version of Irving Berlin's barn-storming musical (a bit old-fashioned even when it appeared in 1946) finally emerged with vastly different personnel. In some ways Hutton and Sidney make a better team: they share a streak of vulgarity five miles wide, and the character of the gun-toting Annie Oakley offers Hutton ample opportunity to do 'what comes naturally', as the song has it. She screams, capers around, fires lots of bullets, and generally lets off sufficient energy to see one through the coldest winter. If you sit towards the back of the cinema, and don't mind leaving your aesthetic scruples with the usherette, you can be guaranteed an enjoyably rowdy, gaudy time.