Movie  1953
Calamity Jane      Back      Home
Calamity Jane: This town ain't big enough! Not for me and that frilled-up, flirtin', man-rustlin' petticoat, it ain't!
Henry Miller: [looks inside stage coach] Is there a woman in here?
[Indians are looking at and touching Frances clothes and bag inside the stage coach]
Francis Fryer: No sir. Just Indians.
Calamity Jane: [singing] At last my heart's an open door / And my secret love's no secret any more.
[Bill is dressed as an Indian woman with a baby]
Calamity Jane: Gosh almighty, it's Bill Hickok!
[proceeds to laugh along with everyone else]
Wild Bill Hickok: [hands baby over] Here take him.
[stands up]
Wild Bill Hickok: The next man that laughs is gonna get his head ventilated.
[silence and Bill sits down. Calamity laughs again after a few moments]
[Katie is looking in a mirror talking to herself in a dressing room]
Katie Brown: You'd like to run away wouldn't you? Catch a train get out of this crazy town. But you can't. Your trapped. There is no train. Oh clever, clever you...
[starts to powder her face is startled by a knock and told she has five minutes. She looks in the mirror and sees her face is white with powder]
Katie Brown: Five minutes and look at you. You haven't even got a face

Calamity Jane: Make mine sarsparilly!
Calamity Jane: Look at these! Silk, pure silk! I'll bet her mother spun 'em!
Calamity Jane: Excitement? Why, I got more arrows in the back of that coach than a porcupine has got stickers!
Calamity Jane: That's better. Next time I tell a story, keep your hands in your *pockets* you toothless old buffalo!
Calamity Jane: [singing] Hi Joe / say where'd you get them fancy clothes? / I know / off some fella's laundry line. / Hi Bow / aren't you the prairie rose / Smell like a watermelon vine.
[the singer is a man in drag]
Wild Bill Hickok: She ain't very good lookin'
Calamity Jane: That ain't all she ain't.
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This 1953 musical is very much a vehicle for Doris Day, in the title role, as a wild cowgal who can outshoot and outsing any boy on the range. When an actress arrives in Deadwood and uses her feminine charms on Jane's secret love, Wild Bill Hickock (Howard Keel), Jane tries to mend her tomboy ways. Not exactly up to the feminist code of honor, this is still energetic and Day is very perky. Of course, one could almost detect a homosexual undercurrent with the cross-dressing Jane, but this was Hollywood in the 1950s, so we best not. This won an Oscar for Best Song--"Secret Love," by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster. --Rochelle O'Gorman