1935!! Surprised to find quick research confirms this was pretty close to the real ANNIE OAKLEY story. Big stars: STANWYCK, PRESTON FORSTER, MELVIN DOUGLAS. BUT the acting left a little to be desired by today's standards, despite the great stars. I'm giving it 3 1/2 RT stars so i can 'recommend it', cuz almost true story, big stars, 1935, probably close to actual BUFFALO BILL's WILD WEST acts, etc. Saw it first time, late May 2022, on the television set 'MOVIES' channel 13.3

Family friendly spin about a downhome gal who makes good in show business, with a touch of A Star Is Born thrown in as dramatic pepper. A great deal of Buffalo Bill's rodeo centers the romance.

Barbara Stanwyck is a good choice for this Annie Oakley biography that charts her touring life with Buffalo Bill well, although it's clearly filmed to the style of the 1930's studio system to make it audience friendly and entertaining rather than being an ind-depth piece of drama.

140127: Enjoyable old love story, chronicling the life of Annie Oakley. The very beautiful Barbara Stanwyck as Annie, made the whole movie. Chief Thunderbird, as Sitting Bull, brought some laughs. You found yourself cheering him on. Wonderful ending. 141024: Flew by.

Romanticized retelling of Annie Oakley's life during her time with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, with Barbara Stanwyck as Oakley. The primary focus of this version of her life is on her romance with fellow performer Toby Walker (who was Frank Butler in real life). This was director George Stevens first western and was Stanwyck's as well. A very enjoyable film all the way around.

"annie oakley" is a lot of fun, and barbara stanwyk is fantastic. but this is one of my least favorite george stevens films, as it doesn't stand out as much as his others do.

stanwyck crafts another brilliant performance as the title character geo stevens 9pre WWII) directs.

this is a lot of fun if not exactly historically accurate or politically correct. authentic reproduction of buffalo bill's wild west show doesn't hurt any

Light and fun, so even though not quite accurate, I enjoyed it.

I think Stanwyck had a great career, but she is very young here and just getting warmed up. I'm not crazy about it.

Yech. I hated Alice Adams, and this aint much of a follow-up for Stevens. We're invited in with the pretense of getting to learn about Annie Oakley, and instead we get some half-assed love triangle story that has nothing whatsoever to do with the real story of Annie Oakley. It's just utterly pointless from start to finish. Not to mention the awful, humiliating portrayal of Sitting Bull as the quaint comic relief. I feel like I'm alone in vastly preferring Stevens' 50s work to his earlier stuff, but to hell with it. As for Annie Oakley, I'd much rather watch Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, any day of the week.

Great classic Hollywood hokum takes on the legend of the famed sharpshooter and gives it the full treatment. Pre-dating 'Annie Get Your Gun' by several years, the plot is pretty much the same 'battle of the sexes' between Stanwyck and Foster, albeit in a more dramatic fashion in the style of 'A Star Is Born'. What could have been sheer twaddle is uplifted by a great star-turn by Stanwyck, who looks great here. George Stevens, who would go on to gain fame as a fine storyteller through such western-set gems like 'Shane' and 'Giant', shows an early penchant for quaint painterly scenes involving country folk. Only drawback is the patronizing tone towards Native-Americans.

2.5: As entertaining as the picture is, it's perhaps most interesting because of the vast differences between George Stevens' version of Annie Oakley and David Milch's in the HBO series Deadwood. This really couldn't be a surprise for anyone even remotely familiar with 1930's Hollywood pictures and/or Deadwood, but that doesn't stop it from being hilarious. The same could be said of Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the 1944 version (or what is depicted here), only their differences are far less extreme. Most of the essentials of Altman's Buffalo Bill are here actually, which is quite surprising, as it really exposes Buffalo Bill and his troupe's artificiality. The tone of the two films is obviously quite different though. This film took the standrad Hollywood line of the day and simply turned a fascinating story into a formulaic genre piece. It certainly isn't the best example of this practice, but it works well enough. I'm particularly fascinated with characters of this sort and this period in history for two main reasons: first, I visited Deadwood often as a child; and second, it depicted a world not wholy divorced from the wetserns I so love. The horse stunts are pretty damn impressive. Hollywood certainly was home to a good deal of adventurous and quality stuntmen during this period. The scene in which the drunk New Yorker's toupee falls off as Sitting Bull stand over him with an axe is pretty funny too. A great bit of the kind they don't do anymore. That's the kind of picture this is: a very lighthearted one that glosses over anything too sinister or serious. It's continually remarkable to me how much filmmaking styles have changed over the years. Pictures from this age are alwasy so clean in appearance, and it isn't just the black and white photography, otherwise Jarmusch's Dead Man would have been just as clean.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as sharpshooter Annie Oakley. A Biopic that apparently has a lot more fiction than fact, but that doesn't stop it from being an entertaining film with great turns by Barbara as Annie Oakley and Preston S. Foster as sharpshooter Toby Taylor. The rest of the cast is good, but it's clearly a film for the two lead actors. It's always a pleasure to watch Barbara on screen. Early in her career she offered a great combination of toughness and beauty that is rarely found in today's Hollywood. When the greatest actresses of all time are brought up, she tragically rarely gets a mention. But she had it all. Especially in those days in which Annie Oakley was made. Annie Oakley is the perfect showcase for a woman in the time of her acting career.

History Stretched a Little As I've said before, one of the prime examples of my film snobbery is that a lot of my favourite members of the "Hollywood elite" are dead, in some cases since before my birth. (Today's star, admittedly, died while I was in junior high, but it was still before I knew who she was.) Admittedly, I shouldn't phrase it that way--it should be "people in the film industry," given that you can't exactly call Akira Kurosawa a member of the Hollywood elite. Still, though, while I take pride in my awareness of film history, which is one of the reasons my psychiatrist always wants to know what I think of movies, I do not take pride in being the only person in my circle of friends to admire these people. This is in no small part because I think it makes these people under-appreciated. I note that one of my friends here--and, really, how many of my "friends" actually read any of my reviews?--is generally among the handful of people who've watched a lot of the more obscure movies, but most of the rest of you have probably never even heard of the stars, much less the movies. Here, we have the luminous, feisty Barbara Stanwyck, that wonderful woman. She's playing the luminous, feisty Annie Oakley, and the film chronicles a hugely fictionalized version of her life from her days as a poor nobody in Ohio, a woman who supports her family by shooting quail for a hotel in the Big City of Cincinnati, to the days where she's the star attraction of the famous Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. She gets her start in this by competing against the "World's Champion" rifleman, Toby Walker (Preston Foster), in front of a large crowd who've gathered to see this nobody get her comeuppance. Though at first, they think it's his, and they'll be seeing Andy Oakley. She throws the match, because she's afraid Toby will lose his newly-signed place in the Wild West Show. However, one of the managers was there to sign the contracts, and it's clear to him what she did. He signs her on as well, and her rivalry with Toby of course blossoms into love. It's kind of disheartening to see how Sitting Bull is shown here. I mean, at least here, he's played by Cheyenne actor Chief Thunderbird (Cheyenne is close enough, I guess), as opposed to the grand old Hollywood tradition of casting people of various other ethnicities. It's notable, for example, that two other members of the Sioux group are played by a Mexican and that old faker, Iron-Eyes Cody, born Espera DiCorti, who did a lot of good for Native American causes but was the son of Italian immigrants. Sitting Bull is shown with a certain amount of dignity, but for all that, he's also kind of comic relief. He talks about wanting his squaws (an Algonquian word in the first place) to cook, not shoot, and he has this insane tendency to go plowing through audiences to get to the person he wants to see. Name a Hollywood cliché about Native Americans, and there it is. It seems pretty well certain that Stanwyck did not do her own shooting. Annie Oakley, the real-live person, was still setting shooting records in 1924, which I suspect is long after most people think she died. It's long after I'd thought she died. Of course, it's pretty hard to show a person shooting and hitting their target on film unless you set your shots up just for that purpose, and you don't get a good look at both if you do that. That, presumably, makes it easy for the insertion of the trick shooter. You get the closeup of the bottles breaking, the portrait of Cody (Moroni Olsen) appearing in bullet holes--suspiciously small and neat bullet holes, in my admittedly uninformed opinion--and all that, which you wouldn't get if you had a long enough camera angle for both shot and shooter. Besides, those long shots are better used for the lovely backdrop showing Washington rising behind the arena. And, of course, the thundering horsemen that were such a staple of the actual, historical show. Heck, it's where they get Sitting Bull most accurate--they show him just kind of sitting on a horse while the show goes on around him. Barbara Stanwyck is one of my favourites. She's overshadowed in the modern eye by no few of her contemporaries, and I think it's a shame. She was a genuinely beautiful woman, for one thing, with a grace and charm Bette Davis, much as I love her, couldn't match. She was outstanding in the pre-Code films which let her be strong and independent. Annie Oakley is a fun character, but she spends more time worrying about Toby's career than her own. On the other hand, in the pre-Codes, she was more interested in herself, or at least equally interested in herself. She did more than a dozen movies in those five years, and it's really what made her a star. Annie Oakley was a confident woman, sure of herself and her abilities, but she's nothing compared to Lily Powers from [i]Baby Face[/i]. It's a crying shame that so many of her films couldn't be seen in so long, and maybe that's why hardly anyone today even knows who she was. She never won an Oscar, though she did get an honourary one, and it's just a great relief that TCM is starting to release pre-Codes in box sets--and great thanks to Allen, who gave me one of the sets for my birthday.

Fun but awfully silly veersion of the Annie Oakley story. Barbara Stanwyk gives it all she's got, and this is what makes the movie work. What makes it not work was the tremendous liberties the filmmakers had with the story. I mean, I'm not well versed on Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and the wild West, but even I could see the hookum coming a mile away.

I remember it fondly. A fun little movie with an amusing cast including Barbara Stanwyck, Melvyn Douglas, and Chief Thunderbird.

Cute old pic found @ Big Lots for $3!

Fiction about Annie Oakley is given some substance by Barbara Stanwyck who seems to be enjoying herself. If you're looking for her real story though go elsewhere.

Fun, family-oriented film. A fave of mine since childhood.