To sum up: Gray was in many ways a hard-right right winger, and when FDR was nominated for a fourth term, Gray went so far as to kill off Warbucks in... retaliation?
Alec Baldwin WISHED this would happen to him every time Bush won. Sorry, Alec, you're stuck here with the rest of us.
Warbucks died, but then a year later, when FDR died, Gray brought Warbucks back, explaining "Daddy" had just faked his own death (an event which did have a lot of precedents in the strip's history).
A fine cigar, a dance on a dead man's grave... These are the good times, kid.
But if all this is true, how in the name of God did the "Annie" Broadway musical get made? Isn't FDR a good guy in that? (And, if you really remember the Broadway version, and not just the movie adaptation: Doesn't Warbucks JOIN the New Dealers at the end of the play???)
Yes. The Broadway play turns the entire forty-plus year Annie Mythos on its ear. It rejects absolutely everything Gray stood for, by having Warbucks sing such songs as "A New Deal for Christmas," and explicitly joining FDR's administration.
Harold Gray had been dead only a few years at this stage. I'm assuming the playwrights sat around as the money rolled in, smoking expensive cigars and gloating over Gray's spinning corpse. Gloating over a dead man! Who DOES that sort of thing!
And then... Came the 80s. And the big budget "Annie" movie, directed by John Huston, intended for a nationwide Reagan's America audience, and costing millions of studio dollars which were therefore on the line if the movie proved unpopular.
A few changes were made.
One: Warbucks never joins the New Deal. (Granted, Warbucks never expounds on anything resembling what Harold Gray's reasons would have been for him to refuse. Instead, he just says the New Deal is going to be poorly managed, and have various logistical issues. But at least the outright reversal of Gray's intent is undone.)
Two: The explicitly anti-Hoover and pro-New Deal songs are cut entirely.
Three: A big "Easy Street" dance number was planned, in which all the extras playing Depression-era poor people would be singing along with the film's villains. This was dropped before the final cut, in exchange for a performance from JUST the bad guys. I wonder if this was originally planned as a sop to right wing America, though: The idea being that the common man out there is just looking to grab an unearned buck at the expense of the honest, hard-working rich. The opposite side of the coin represented by the Gary Cooper movie "High Noon," where the common man is supposed to be a total coward, to prove some self-proclaimed leftist point about Americans having no values. Both of these notions kind of make me sick with their extremely pointed misanthropy, and I'm glad the one was cut from Annie.
Four: Albert Finney as Warbucks gets an amazing moment which, to me, DOES finally do justice to Gray's vision. As he finally joins in with FDR & Co. to sing their little song (but nothing else), Finney gives a look to the portrait of Washington, and then eye-rollingly looks back at the Liberal Legion he's singing along with. And doesn't he really make it look as if Washington is on HIS side?
Well, not in this picture. And I can't find it on Youtube. Look, just go find the movie and watch it again! It's great!
So there you have it. Another political crime by those liberal fat cats in Big Broadway set right by those speakin'-truth-to-power little guys at Columbia TriStar! (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Coca-Cola Company, NYSE: KO)
No comments:
Post a Comment