During the Great Depression of the 1930s, redheaded orphan Annie (Aileen Quinn) escapes from the clutches of the hateful Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett) to spend a week living in luxury with billionaire Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney). Though distant at first, Warbucks eventually grows to care enough about her to want to adopt her. Annie, John Huston’s vibrant, colorful, occasionally rambling adaptation of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s revered 1977 Broadway musical features memorable performances from an unbeatable cast. Sony’s 30th Anniversary Blu-ray offers only a small helping of extras, but its picture and sound, despite three missing sound effects, exceed all prior video incarnations. Recommended with a reservation.
Annie: 30th Anniversary Edition (1982)
Studio: Sony
Year: 1982
Rated: PG
Length: 127 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Resolution: 1080p
Languages: English DTS-HD MA 5.1, French Dolby Digital 2.0, German Dolby Digital 2.0, Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1, Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0, Italian Dolby Digital 4.0
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish
MSRP: $14.99
Film Release Date: May 21, 1982
Disc Release Date: October 2, 2012
Review Date: October 15, 2012
“The sun’ll come out tomorrow.
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
The Movie:
3.5/5
The decline of newspapers in the face of new media technologies has taken its toll on a venerable institution known as the comic strip. In 2010, Tribune announced the end of Little Orphan Annie, a strip started in 1924 by Harold Gray (1894-1968). Her curly red hair, pupil-less eyes, optimistic attitude and international adventures made her an American icon during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her popularity wasn’t just limited to comic strips, eventually spawning a radio serial. During the country’s next great economic crisis in the recession of the 1970s, the strip's principal characters made the jump to Broadway by way of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s seven-time Tony Award-winning musical Annie, which has just started its second Broadway revival. While Hollywood had attempted to bring the character to the screen in 1932 and 1938, she wouldn’t be seen on celluloid again until 1982, when Columbia Pictures brought the musical to the screen.
In 1933, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Edward Herrmann) is serving his second hundred days as President, 10-year-old orphan Annie (Aileen Quinn) lives a life of squalor at the Hudson Street Home for Girls in New York City. As she and her fellow orphans endure a life of emotional—and occasional physical—abuse from Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett), the orphanage’s perpetually drunk, embittered, lovelorn manager, Annie dreams of the possibility of seeing her parents again. After rescuing a shaggy dog named Sandy, her chance for a better life comes when Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), personal secretary to billionaire industrialist Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney), stops by the orphanage to look for a girl to bring to Warbucks’ palatial Fifth Avenue estate for a week, a publicity stunt calculated to show his concern for the poor. Despite Miss Hannigan’s protests, Grace chooses Annie. While she grows accustomed to her new surroundings very quickly, and the staff, including Warbucks’ stoic Indian bodyguard Punjab (Geoffrey Holder), learns to love her just as quickly, the temperamental Warbucks, a self-made man who comes from background similar to Annie’s, finds her an acquired taste. But by the end of their week together, capped off by his renting out Radio City Music Hall for a private screening of Camille, he has a change of heart and decides to adopt her. However, she turns down his offer, telling him that after she was born, her parents left her at the orphanage with a locket, breaking off half of it in order to use it to claim her someday. With the aid of his numerous connections in both the public and private sectors, Warbucks launches a radio campaign on Bert Healy’s (Peter Marshall) radio show, offering $50,000 to Annie’s parents, which gives Miss Hannigan’s ex-con little brother Rooster (Tim Curry) and his ditzy girlfriend Lily St. Regis (Bernadette Peters) an idea of how to pull themselves out of poverty.
What makes Annie work is how shamelessly entertaining it is. Everyone in the cast seems to be having the time of their lives, and their performances are totally in sync with the film’s heightened reality. With a performance unusually reminiscent of the director, Albert Finney is larger than life as Warbucks. His facial reactions in the White House version of “Tomorrow” provide the film with one of its funniest moments, diffusing its sentimentality effectively. In every scene she’s in, Carol Burnett steals the show with her deliciously wicked Miss Hannigan, showing off her uncanny ability to go over the top and still retain her humanity. Ann Reinking is charming as Grace Farrell, getting ample opportunity to strut her stuff in two new numbers: “Let’s Go to the Movies” and “We Got Annie.” Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters are fine choices as Rooster and Lily, and probably the best singers out of the whole cast, but they’re underused, especially Ms. Peters. Aileen Quinn, who beat out 8,000 other girls for the coveted title role, gives it a tomboyish twist, full of street smarts, but with a big heart underneath. Though her voice is much smaller than the “belt” voice usually associated with the role, she sings with clarity, enthusiasm and energy. There’s some intangible quality in her that makes Annie’s boundless optimism in the face of a cruel world seem perfectly believable. The other orphans seem to function more as a unit than as individual characters, but Toni Ann Gisondi and Rosanne Sorrentino stand out as Molly and Pepper, respectively.
This may have been a 1980s movie, but except for Warbucks’ political beliefs, it’s not of the 1980s. It’s a 1930s period piece whose production is still in the late 1960s roadshow mindset. Compared to the likes of the Vincente Minnellis and Stanley Donens, John Huston may have been a novice at musicals, but his efforts here certainly surpass most others who tried their hands at musicals around the same time. Though the framing is sometimes too tight, he wisely refrains from the smoke-and-mirrors music video editing techniques soon to be popularized by MTV, instead trying to use as many long or medium-length takes as possible without feeling stagebound, even incorporating some sly visual gags into the mix. Choreographer Arlene Phillips gives the dancing an impromptu feel in many scenes, which somehow seems organic to the characters. The numbers at the orphanage are deliberately rough and chaotic, while those in the mansion and elsewhere are more polished. These elements combine to keep the pace moving even when the story starts to veer off-course and the production starts to indulge in its elaborate surroundings.
Like many screen adaptations of Broadway shows, Annie plays fast and loose with its source material, which, in turn, took many liberties with the comic strip. Ray Stark later admitted he didn’t like the show and didn’t want to make a faithful film version; under the circumstances, it’s astounding the film is as good as it is! Seeking a middle ground between the two sources, screenwriter Carol Sobieski moves the setting from Christmas to the summer, amplifies the play’s darker aspects and incorporates some of the mysticism and fantasy of the original strip. It retains much of the basic story structure and attitude towards FDR and the New Deal, but focuses more on the main story. The score undergoes changes, too. Most of the best songs are there—though the immortal “Tomorrow” inexplicably becomes an opening credits song, in a manner reminiscent of 1940s and 1950s Disney animated films, and “Easy Street” loses its first verse—while Strouse and Charnin were brought in to write five new ones, the best of which is “Sign,” an amusing duet between Burnett and Finney. Some integrate into the story better than others; “Let’s Go to the Movies” is a catchy song and a splashy number, but it has less to do with the plot than the film’s wistful nostalgia for a long-gone era of moviemaking, though in all fairness, it does come after the plot’s weakest point: as Warbucks and Annie get to know one another during their week together. In contrast to the rest of the film, the initial development of their relationship’s emotional arc seems rushed. A scene with a bomb-throwing Bolshevik goes nowhere, The New Deal only gets lip service at best, despite the best efforts of Edward Herrmann as our 32nd president; he also played the role in the 1970s Eleanor and Franklin mini-series. Also, there are some obvious editing mistakes; watch the lips of staff singing “Tomorrow” in the background in the last shot of the film. And it would have taken all of ten seconds to explain how Miss Hannigan avoided jail for her part in the kidnapping long enough to end up riding on an elephant at Annie’s adoption party. Little things like these are difficult to overlook, but they don’t negate the good parts.
Annie grossed $57,059,003 domestically, coming in 10th place for the year in the face of an intensely competitive summer line-up that included E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (the top-grossing film of all-time until 1997), Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Rocky III, An Officer and a Gentleman and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Though its domestic intake was insufficient to cover its enormous (by 1982 standards) production costs, and Hollywood gave no awards to anyone for their efforts in the film, it appears to have had a healthy second life on home video and TV. Ironically, it is Huston’s highest-grossing film.
The Video:
4/5
To say that Annie had a hard-knock life on DVD would be an understatement. It first DVD came out in 2000 with a misframed transfer that was recalled and corrected, but quickly discontinued. Sony released a “Special Anniversary Edition” in 2004, upgrading the soundtrack from a muffled 2.0 track to a 5.1 DTS track—while presenting the film in a pan-and-scan transfer! Happily, this Blu-ray preserves the original 2.40:1 ratio of Richard Moore’s Panavision cinematography. The AVC-encoded transfer is free from moiré, video noise or DNR. Saturation is relatively strong, but never garish, even during the most ostentatious parts. The colors are appropriately drab and neutral at the orphanage, but they become brighter and more vivid in the exteriors at Warbucks’ mansion. Contrast is strong, black levels are deep, and whites are bright without getting blown out. Grain is light, but a few shots have higher levels than the overwhelming majority of them. Sharpness varies from shot to shot. The sharper shots reveals details no DVD could ever reveal, but it appears numerous shots seem to have used diffusion filters, thus making them softer naturally. I had no part in making the film, and I wasn’t alive for the film’s theatrical release, so I can neither compare it to the original release prints nor make a definitive call on its accuracy, but it is better than any past video version I’ve seen.
The Audio:
3/5
Originally released in Dolby Stereo (with some 70mm blow-ups in six track stereo), the film has been treated to an upgrade to 5.1 DTS-HD MA that really makes Ralph Burns’ Oscar-nominated orchestrations come alive. It comes in clearly and powerfully with vibrant high ends, strong bass and clear vocals. The sound effects don’t have the same level of sonic power as the score. The dialogue has average fidelity and is inconsistent in volume. Those sound like they are inherent to the source, but what’s more troubling it has three missing sounds:
—00:00:20: When the Columbia logo fades out, there are supposed to be drums as the logo music transitions into “Tomorrow,” but they aren’t there.
—00:15:42: As Annie defends herself against a boy in the alley, he grunts as she punches him in the gut. Those grunts are nowhere to be heard.
—02:05:25: There is supposed to be a harp glissando over the last half bar of “Tomorrow” before it transitions into an instrumental version of “Little Girls,” but it is gone.
For those wanting to hear how the songs sound in other languages, the disc offers French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Italian tracks. The aforementioned problems don’t occur on any of these tracks.
The Extras:
2/5
While those hoping for a fully dressed special edition will be disappointed, the disc still has a modest selection of features. All extras are 1080p and 16x9 unless noted otherwise.
—Sing Along with Annie: An option to either watch the film’s songs separately or to watch the movie with flashing subtitles.
—My Hollywood Adventure with Aileen Quinn (480p, 12:04): The now-grown Ms. Quinn returns to the still-standing Hudson Street set for a short behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Created for the 2004 DVD, it includes footage of her screen test and clips from the late Andrew J. Kuehn’s informative documentary Lights, Camera, Annie!, made for PBS to promote the film upon its release.
—Play! Music Video: “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” (480p, 4x3, 3:20): A Swedish-based teen pop group performs a synthesized version of the song.
—Original Trailers and TV spots:
• Theatrical Trailer (3:40, 2.40:1)
• Behind The Scenes Teaser Trailer (2:08): Among other things, this trailer reveals production footage of the originally intended, more elaborate version of “Easy Street.”
• TV Spot #1 (1:03)
• TV Spot #2 (0:33)
• TV Spot #3 (0:33)
—Preview for Arthur Christmas (1:28)
—UV Digital Copy
Gone from the old DVD are the “Act Along With Annie” and “The Age of Annie” featurettes. In addition, the original Region 2 DVD had a mono isolated score track that has never appeared anywhere else.
Final Score:
3.5/5
After 30 years, John Huston’s Annie remains an engaging, old-fashioned spectacle with a lavish, colorful period production, memorable music and deliciously over-the-top performances by a stellar cast. Despite the lack of a more substantial supplement section, the sun has finally come out for the film in terms of its technical presentation, though three sounds are missing. Recommended with a minor reservation.
Annie: 30th Anniversary Edition (1982)
Studio: Sony
Year: 1982
Rated: PG
Length: 127 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
Resolution: 1080p
Languages: English DTS-HD MA 5.1, French Dolby Digital 2.0, German Dolby Digital 2.0, Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1, Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0, Italian Dolby Digital 4.0
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish
MSRP: $14.99
Film Release Date: May 21, 1982
Disc Release Date: October 2, 2012
Review Date: October 15, 2012
“The sun’ll come out tomorrow.
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.”
The Movie:
3.5/5
The decline of newspapers in the face of new media technologies has taken its toll on a venerable institution known as the comic strip. In 2010, Tribune announced the end of Little Orphan Annie, a strip started in 1924 by Harold Gray (1894-1968). Her curly red hair, pupil-less eyes, optimistic attitude and international adventures made her an American icon during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Her popularity wasn’t just limited to comic strips, eventually spawning a radio serial. During the country’s next great economic crisis in the recession of the 1970s, the strip's principal characters made the jump to Broadway by way of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin’s seven-time Tony Award-winning musical Annie, which has just started its second Broadway revival. While Hollywood had attempted to bring the character to the screen in 1932 and 1938, she wouldn’t be seen on celluloid again until 1982, when Columbia Pictures brought the musical to the screen.
In 1933, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Edward Herrmann) is serving his second hundred days as President, 10-year-old orphan Annie (Aileen Quinn) lives a life of squalor at the Hudson Street Home for Girls in New York City. As she and her fellow orphans endure a life of emotional—and occasional physical—abuse from Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett), the orphanage’s perpetually drunk, embittered, lovelorn manager, Annie dreams of the possibility of seeing her parents again. After rescuing a shaggy dog named Sandy, her chance for a better life comes when Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), personal secretary to billionaire industrialist Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney), stops by the orphanage to look for a girl to bring to Warbucks’ palatial Fifth Avenue estate for a week, a publicity stunt calculated to show his concern for the poor. Despite Miss Hannigan’s protests, Grace chooses Annie. While she grows accustomed to her new surroundings very quickly, and the staff, including Warbucks’ stoic Indian bodyguard Punjab (Geoffrey Holder), learns to love her just as quickly, the temperamental Warbucks, a self-made man who comes from background similar to Annie’s, finds her an acquired taste. But by the end of their week together, capped off by his renting out Radio City Music Hall for a private screening of Camille, he has a change of heart and decides to adopt her. However, she turns down his offer, telling him that after she was born, her parents left her at the orphanage with a locket, breaking off half of it in order to use it to claim her someday. With the aid of his numerous connections in both the public and private sectors, Warbucks launches a radio campaign on Bert Healy’s (Peter Marshall) radio show, offering $50,000 to Annie’s parents, which gives Miss Hannigan’s ex-con little brother Rooster (Tim Curry) and his ditzy girlfriend Lily St. Regis (Bernadette Peters) an idea of how to pull themselves out of poverty.
What makes Annie work is how shamelessly entertaining it is. Everyone in the cast seems to be having the time of their lives, and their performances are totally in sync with the film’s heightened reality. With a performance unusually reminiscent of the director, Albert Finney is larger than life as Warbucks. His facial reactions in the White House version of “Tomorrow” provide the film with one of its funniest moments, diffusing its sentimentality effectively. In every scene she’s in, Carol Burnett steals the show with her deliciously wicked Miss Hannigan, showing off her uncanny ability to go over the top and still retain her humanity. Ann Reinking is charming as Grace Farrell, getting ample opportunity to strut her stuff in two new numbers: “Let’s Go to the Movies” and “We Got Annie.” Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters are fine choices as Rooster and Lily, and probably the best singers out of the whole cast, but they’re underused, especially Ms. Peters. Aileen Quinn, who beat out 8,000 other girls for the coveted title role, gives it a tomboyish twist, full of street smarts, but with a big heart underneath. Though her voice is much smaller than the “belt” voice usually associated with the role, she sings with clarity, enthusiasm and energy. There’s some intangible quality in her that makes Annie’s boundless optimism in the face of a cruel world seem perfectly believable. The other orphans seem to function more as a unit than as individual characters, but Toni Ann Gisondi and Rosanne Sorrentino stand out as Molly and Pepper, respectively.
This may have been a 1980s movie, but except for Warbucks’ political beliefs, it’s not of the 1980s. It’s a 1930s period piece whose production is still in the late 1960s roadshow mindset. Compared to the likes of the Vincente Minnellis and Stanley Donens, John Huston may have been a novice at musicals, but his efforts here certainly surpass most others who tried their hands at musicals around the same time. Though the framing is sometimes too tight, he wisely refrains from the smoke-and-mirrors music video editing techniques soon to be popularized by MTV, instead trying to use as many long or medium-length takes as possible without feeling stagebound, even incorporating some sly visual gags into the mix. Choreographer Arlene Phillips gives the dancing an impromptu feel in many scenes, which somehow seems organic to the characters. The numbers at the orphanage are deliberately rough and chaotic, while those in the mansion and elsewhere are more polished. These elements combine to keep the pace moving even when the story starts to veer off-course and the production starts to indulge in its elaborate surroundings.
Like many screen adaptations of Broadway shows, Annie plays fast and loose with its source material, which, in turn, took many liberties with the comic strip. Ray Stark later admitted he didn’t like the show and didn’t want to make a faithful film version; under the circumstances, it’s astounding the film is as good as it is! Seeking a middle ground between the two sources, screenwriter Carol Sobieski moves the setting from Christmas to the summer, amplifies the play’s darker aspects and incorporates some of the mysticism and fantasy of the original strip. It retains much of the basic story structure and attitude towards FDR and the New Deal, but focuses more on the main story. The score undergoes changes, too. Most of the best songs are there—though the immortal “Tomorrow” inexplicably becomes an opening credits song, in a manner reminiscent of 1940s and 1950s Disney animated films, and “Easy Street” loses its first verse—while Strouse and Charnin were brought in to write five new ones, the best of which is “Sign,” an amusing duet between Burnett and Finney. Some integrate into the story better than others; “Let’s Go to the Movies” is a catchy song and a splashy number, but it has less to do with the plot than the film’s wistful nostalgia for a long-gone era of moviemaking, though in all fairness, it does come after the plot’s weakest point: as Warbucks and Annie get to know one another during their week together. In contrast to the rest of the film, the initial development of their relationship’s emotional arc seems rushed. A scene with a bomb-throwing Bolshevik goes nowhere, The New Deal only gets lip service at best, despite the best efforts of Edward Herrmann as our 32nd president; he also played the role in the 1970s Eleanor and Franklin mini-series. Also, there are some obvious editing mistakes; watch the lips of staff singing “Tomorrow” in the background in the last shot of the film. And it would have taken all of ten seconds to explain how Miss Hannigan avoided jail for her part in the kidnapping long enough to end up riding on an elephant at Annie’s adoption party. Little things like these are difficult to overlook, but they don’t negate the good parts.
Annie grossed $57,059,003 domestically, coming in 10th place for the year in the face of an intensely competitive summer line-up that included E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (the top-grossing film of all-time until 1997), Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Rocky III, An Officer and a Gentleman and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Though its domestic intake was insufficient to cover its enormous (by 1982 standards) production costs, and Hollywood gave no awards to anyone for their efforts in the film, it appears to have had a healthy second life on home video and TV. Ironically, it is Huston’s highest-grossing film.
The Video:
4/5
To say that Annie had a hard-knock life on DVD would be an understatement. It first DVD came out in 2000 with a misframed transfer that was recalled and corrected, but quickly discontinued. Sony released a “Special Anniversary Edition” in 2004, upgrading the soundtrack from a muffled 2.0 track to a 5.1 DTS track—while presenting the film in a pan-and-scan transfer! Happily, this Blu-ray preserves the original 2.40:1 ratio of Richard Moore’s Panavision cinematography. The AVC-encoded transfer is free from moiré, video noise or DNR. Saturation is relatively strong, but never garish, even during the most ostentatious parts. The colors are appropriately drab and neutral at the orphanage, but they become brighter and more vivid in the exteriors at Warbucks’ mansion. Contrast is strong, black levels are deep, and whites are bright without getting blown out. Grain is light, but a few shots have higher levels than the overwhelming majority of them. Sharpness varies from shot to shot. The sharper shots reveals details no DVD could ever reveal, but it appears numerous shots seem to have used diffusion filters, thus making them softer naturally. I had no part in making the film, and I wasn’t alive for the film’s theatrical release, so I can neither compare it to the original release prints nor make a definitive call on its accuracy, but it is better than any past video version I’ve seen.
The Audio:
3/5
Originally released in Dolby Stereo (with some 70mm blow-ups in six track stereo), the film has been treated to an upgrade to 5.1 DTS-HD MA that really makes Ralph Burns’ Oscar-nominated orchestrations come alive. It comes in clearly and powerfully with vibrant high ends, strong bass and clear vocals. The sound effects don’t have the same level of sonic power as the score. The dialogue has average fidelity and is inconsistent in volume. Those sound like they are inherent to the source, but what’s more troubling it has three missing sounds:
—00:00:20: When the Columbia logo fades out, there are supposed to be drums as the logo music transitions into “Tomorrow,” but they aren’t there.
—00:15:42: As Annie defends herself against a boy in the alley, he grunts as she punches him in the gut. Those grunts are nowhere to be heard.
—02:05:25: There is supposed to be a harp glissando over the last half bar of “Tomorrow” before it transitions into an instrumental version of “Little Girls,” but it is gone.
For those wanting to hear how the songs sound in other languages, the disc offers French, German, Japanese, Spanish and Italian tracks. The aforementioned problems don’t occur on any of these tracks.
The Extras:
2/5
While those hoping for a fully dressed special edition will be disappointed, the disc still has a modest selection of features. All extras are 1080p and 16x9 unless noted otherwise.
—Sing Along with Annie: An option to either watch the film’s songs separately or to watch the movie with flashing subtitles.
—My Hollywood Adventure with Aileen Quinn (480p, 12:04): The now-grown Ms. Quinn returns to the still-standing Hudson Street set for a short behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Created for the 2004 DVD, it includes footage of her screen test and clips from the late Andrew J. Kuehn’s informative documentary Lights, Camera, Annie!, made for PBS to promote the film upon its release.
—Play! Music Video: “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” (480p, 4x3, 3:20): A Swedish-based teen pop group performs a synthesized version of the song.
—Original Trailers and TV spots:
• Theatrical Trailer (3:40, 2.40:1)
• Behind The Scenes Teaser Trailer (2:08): Among other things, this trailer reveals production footage of the originally intended, more elaborate version of “Easy Street.”
• TV Spot #1 (1:03)
• TV Spot #2 (0:33)
• TV Spot #3 (0:33)
—Preview for Arthur Christmas (1:28)
—UV Digital Copy
Gone from the old DVD are the “Act Along With Annie” and “The Age of Annie” featurettes. In addition, the original Region 2 DVD had a mono isolated score track that has never appeared anywhere else.
Final Score:
3.5/5
After 30 years, John Huston’s Annie remains an engaging, old-fashioned spectacle with a lavish, colorful period production, memorable music and deliciously over-the-top performances by a stellar cast. Despite the lack of a more substantial supplement section, the sun has finally come out for the film in terms of its technical presentation, though three sounds are missing. Recommended with a minor reservation.
