Rough and Dirty Girlhood in ANNIE (1982)

In his original review of the 1982 film musical, Roger Ebert offers qualified - and often rather faint - praise for Annie but says he doesn't know if kids will actually like the movie. Ebert doesn't find the story's heroine very compelling or believable, but it's noteworthy that all of the other child characters and performers he mentions in comparison are boys: Oliver Twist in Oliver! (1968), Henry Thomas in E.T. (1982), and Ricky Shroder in general. I recently rewatched Annie, and I have a very different perspective on the picture from the late, great reviewer, having actually been a ten year old girl (the same age as Annie herself) when I first saw the movie in theaters in 1982. While certain elements have aged poorly or lack the same appeal they had when I was a child, I can still see why my younger sister and I were so thoroughly charmed by the spunky heroine and her fellow orphans that we belted out "Tomorrow" incessantly and even got dolls of some of the characters. Yes, we were kids who liked Annie, and although we enjoyed the music and the adult characters very much, what really appealed to us was the depiction of girlhood as we experienced it, a rough and dirty childhood full of fights, conflict, and unbrushed hair.

Our culture as a whole has long imagined girls as more or less the opposite of boys. Girls are dear little things who play with dolls while waiting to grow up into loving wives and mothers. Even when they're protagonists and not merely supporting characters, most of them have to be pretty, kind, and generally well-behaved as models of permissible girl behavior. Shirley Temple, the quintessential "little girl" of Hollywood, wins everyone over with her dimpled sweetness, and even Alice and Dorothy are depicted as very "proper" girls in most of their film and TV adaptations (when their girlhood is not erased entirely by making them teenagers or even adults). There are exceptions, of course, like the Little House on the Prairie books and TV series, but celebrated girl-centered stories are harder to come by than stories about boys, and stories about groups of young girls (not marriageable young women) are even rarer.

Annie dispenses with all of those well-worn stereotypes about who and what girls are, replacing the usual sugar and spice with Depression era spunk. It's both a girl's version of Oliver Twist and a prepubescent take on Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), with a scrappy crew of orphan girls trying to survive by their wits, camaraderie, and sheer stubbornness. Imagine the delight my little sister and I experienced seeing these dirty, grumpy, combative girls playing tricks on Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett) and fighting amongst themselves just like we often did, much to our mother's dismay. We were girls who played outside, got dirty, tore our clothes, and only brushed our hair under duress. Annie and her friends provided a rare chance to see girls who looked and acted like us on the big screen, and we loved them for it. It helped that they weren't preternaturally cute or beautiful, like so many of the little and big girls Hollywood showcases. Mop wig aside, Aileen Quinn's Annie seemed like a kid we'd like to know, even if we felt disappointed that she had to be rescued by adults in the final act. We were hoping she'd kick Tim Curry's Rooster right off the top of the train bridge and send him screaming to his death, but at least she tore up the ill-gotten check and made her initial escape all by herself, while her friends persevered in their race to uncover the villains' deception.

In the decades since Annie, Hollywood movies have made some progress in telling stories about girls, especially in films like Matilda (1996), but Japan's Hiyao Miyazaki has done far better with My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004), just to name a few of the Studio Ghibli movies to center the experiences of young girls as interesting and not idealized characters. Women film reviewers, however, are still well aware of the dearth of great movies about young girls, as Anya Jaremko-Greenwold opines in the 2016 Atlantic essay, "Why Hollywood Doesn't Tell More Stories for - and About - Girls." Given that Hollywood still doesn't make many movies like Annie, I'm glad that today's little girls can see the 1982 version in spite of its dated elements. Maybe, at this very moment, some stubborn little girl with tangled pigtails and a dirty face is watching the movie on Netflix as the orphans sing "It's the Hard Knock Life" and delighting in the vision of girls who look and act like her.

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"High School Movies, Then and Now" (2018)

Requiem for Roger

I always liked this book cover.

If you read movie blogs, you will read dozens of tributes to Roger Ebert in the coming days. You might even read hundreds, were you so inclined. More fortunate souls than myself will have personal encounters to relate, of chance meetings or lucky breaks that got them where they are today with Ebert's encouragement and help.

Alas, I grew up in rural South Georgia, far from Chicago and worlds away from Hollywood, but Roger Ebert found me there, too. Like so many members of my generation, I grew up with Siskel and Ebert, their thumbs up or down, their wisecracks and praise lighting up the balcony and telling me all I needed to know about movies that would probably never play in Jesup, GA. Long before I knew what literary criticism and scholarship were, their insights shaped my understanding of narrative, character, and plot. In later years I faithfully read Ebert's take on every movie I saw or considered going to see, weighing his reviews with my own evolving thoughts.

Given the way my life has turned out, Roger Ebert probably taught me more than many of my graduate professors, who thought I needed a tenure-track job to do what I wanted to do. Looking at Ebert's work, especially in the last years after his health declined, I came to understand that a writer - or a critic, of whatever kind - does not require a university or an office with a title on the door. Indeed, the great critics of the 19th century would have been perplexed at the very idea. A writer writes and finds a way to reach readers who will care. Roger Ebert could not even speak anymore, but he kept writing and embraced new ways of reaching out to readers. He was inspirational, not just in his words, but in the way he forged ahead and found ways to do what mattered the most to him.

While I'm envious of the people who met Roger Ebert, who got to shake his hand or tell him what he meant to them, I'm glad to be one of the many thousands whose lives were touched by his work and his passion for film. He had a very long reach from that balcony, and we're all the better for it.