Poor Betty Hutton. She may have won a Golden Globe for the movie version of "Annie Get Your Gun", but her TV musical special "Satin & Spurs" was considered a grave fiasco that lead to a down curve in her career that made her a has-been by the end of the 1950's. Her "Panama Hattie" co-star Ethel Merman had owned this role on Broadway, and her "Happy Go Lucky" movie co-star Mary Martin got to do the original national tour. Ten years after that, Martin decided to take that and "South Pacific" out on tour again, and after successful productions of both in Los Angeles and San Francisco, was convinced to star in a live TV broadcast of "Annie Get Your Gun". It was an event. Magazine articles, a TV Guide cover, a cast album and the surviving kinescope show this to have been highly anticipated, while it took decades for the movie version of "Annie Get Your Gun" to get a TV broadcast or a home video release.

Only two years before this, Mary Martin had made TV history appearing with Merman in a lengthy duet celebrating both of their careers, and they would repeat that again in the 1970's for a sold out night night Broadway concert where as dueling Annie's and Dolly Levi's, they proved why their contrasting images made them co-queens of the musical theater. Certainly, you'd never see Martin as the determined stage mother in "Gypsy", and you'd never see Merman as the nanny ex-nun in "The Sound of Music". Merman, not mincing words, once said, "Mary's O.K. if you like talent", and when her Mama Rose lost the Tony to Mary's Maria Rainier, she notoriously asked the press, "How do you buck a nun?" But something tells me that Merman was one of millions watching that night that Mary went on in her original role of Annie Oakley, and while Merman would play Annie on TV in the 1960's, that version has completely fallen off the face of the earth, while Mary's remains.

Kinescope isn't the most watchable of ways to see classic TV, but when it's all you've got, you deal with it. Mary is certainly less brassy than Merman and Hutton, but that doesn't stop her from stealing the scenery. To this day, I still think her version of "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun" is by far the best, milking the laughs in the most clever of ways. She's got the handsome John Raitt as Frank Butler, ironically the same year that he filmed his one and only movie appearance in "The Pajama Game" opposite Doris Day, who herself would do a recording of "Annie Get Your Gun" (with Robert Goulet). Raitt is handsome and masculine, but not so macho that you long to see Martin take him down a peg or two. He's certainly the best looking of the Frank Butler's I've ever seen, and when he tones down his masculinity for some romance, it's va-va-voom between him and Mary. Raitt's "Pajama Game" co-star Reta Shaw is quite a unique take on Dolly Tate, quite ample but funny, with William O'Neal a commanding Buffalo Bill Cody. I'm sure the stage production of the Martin/Raitt tour looked far more glamorous than the minimalized sets, but we're not talking about the live musicals we've gotten off of network TV in the past five years. We're talking about the early days of TV. I've seen many of the stage musicals they did during this era, and this production is by far the best of them all.

I didn't expect much. Uusally when I see Mary Martin, she plays a version of Mary Martin. In this case, she acted the hell out of Annie Oakley. She was charming, funny, believable and totally committed to this role. She was incredibly believable as a hillbilly. I think this is a role she was born to play. I think she was better than any other Annie-even (dare I say it as an Ethel lover) Ethel Merman. If you can, see this performance- see it! . It shows why Mary was the beloved stage star she was. I also think the judicious trimming of Annie Gets Your Gun works in its favor. Always a treat to see Rita Shaw in a musical and she doesn't disappoint as Dolly. John Raitt is good too. A delight. Wish they'd re release it on DVD

In tackling one of the great Ethel Merman's three or four signature roles, Annie in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, Mary Martin (possibly the only actress who could surpass Merman as THE musical comedy star of the 20th Century) refused to play the role anywhere near New York where Merman "owned" it. That didn't stop her from winning her first Tony Award for the part - a "Special" award "for bringing Broadway to the nation" when she took out the first National Tour for 11 months from 1947 to 1948, under Joshua Logan's original Broadway direction before going into her career re-defining role under his direction in SOUTH PACIFIC (Martin had begun as a classic sex-kitten in LEAVE IT TO ME, ONE TOUCH OF VENUS and a score of fairly delightful but now largely forgotten Paramount films and two pre-Broadway flops in between).

A decade later, after SOUTH PACIFIC (Broadway and London),PETER PAN (Broadway and TV),an international tour (also winding up on Broadway and TV) of THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, and a TV production of BORN YESTERDAY, Martin returned to Annie, this time with John Raitt as her Frank Butler and new direction by Martin's favorite director for the later part of her career, Vincent J. Donehue, for runs in San Fransisco and Los Angeles from August through November of 1957, when the show was colorcast on NBC on the 27th.

Native Texan though Martin was (interestingly, the initial scenes in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN are set in Ohio - it's as far west as the show ever goes!),truth be told she was, under Donehue's revised direction, too lady-like and modern to be entirely satisfactory as Annie Oakley, but any Martin performance was (and is) a joy to behold and in the ANNIE GET YOUR GUN broadcast, her supporting cast (including the wonderful Reta Shaw as the comic Dolly Tate) was as close to perfection as anyone could wish.

In the days before videotape, Irving Berlin (who wrote the show's score when Jerome Kern died after first being contracted, and owned the rights) was convinced that the survival of even the improved quality kinescopes which were being made by 1957 would harm the continuing value of his underlying property, and demanded that ALL network copies of the broadcast (AND the later broadcast of the 1967 Broadway revisal with original star Ethel Merman!) be destroyed.

It is our GREAT good fortune that at least one copy survived to resurface years later (the Merman broadcast is still among the missing) to be briefly (and without rights clearances) issued by a tiny company before the Berlin estate could get a "cease and desist" order.

SOMEONE should persuade the estate to negotiate for an official release of this wonderful document, for unless and until the promised film of the piece is made with Reba McEntire (who stood Broadway on its ear when she replaced a miscast but award winning Bernadette Peters in a poorly rewritten 1999-2001 revival),this is by far the most satisfying version extant of the classic musical - and it won't be TOO long before the more reasonable European copyright laws may make the broadcast legitimately available there without generating ANY income for the Estate.